Political Quotes

“there are several problems that I have with the bill. I just want to point out a couple of them. The first, Mr. Chairman, is the fact that we are taking $2.5 billion out of the 1994 crime bill from the programs that actually work. That $2.5 billion added to prisons will be a drop in the bucket for the prison expenditures. We already have an incarceration rate five times that of the rest of the industrialized world. Putting $2.5 more billion into it will do very little good at all. We heard evidence that the city of Philadelphia could use almost $2.5 billion itself. Texas and California are going to spend tens of billions of dollars. Virginia, if they fund the present program that we passed last August, will spend about $7 billion in the next 10 years on prisons. Our share of this $2.5 billion will be about 1 percent of what we are already spending, so it will not make any difference, but it will take money away from what works. Drug courts have been studied. We can have, in lieu of an incarceration strategy, going to a treatment strategy, Mr. Chairman. We can have a drop in crime of 80 percent at a cost of one-twentieth of what it costs to lock people up. If you eliminate that program, and we have $1 billion in the present crime bill, but not in the crime bill that is before us, if we eliminate that, we will spend 20 times more money and end up with about 5 times more crime. We can do better than that.”