Political Quotes

“at 5:30, we will be voting on the first procedural step to take up criminal justice reform legislation that started back in 2013 when I introduced a bill we called Federal prison reform. This legislation is based on prison reform, but it has taken on some additional attributes relative to how we sentence and how judges sentence people convicted of various crimes. Let me explain a little bit about why this should be a priority for the Senate and for the Congress and for the country. We know the cycle of crime is all too common. People commit crimes. They serve time in prison. They get out of prison. They commit another crime. They serve time again in prison. They are released. A few years ago, this is what one young man in Houston said when he was talking about his own experience: He called himself a ``frequent flyer''--somebody caught in that revolving door of prison and crime. In Texas, in 2007, or thereabouts, we had some farsighted visionary leaders, actually, who decided instead of just being tough on crime, which Texas has always had a reputation for, we needed to be smart on crime too. A little more than a decade ago, Texas prisons were bursting at the seams. We had more people incarcerated in Texas prisons than any State in the Nation, and tragically we also had high recidivism rates. So it was obvious we were doing something wrong, and we needed to up our game.…”