Political Quotes

“as the founder and cochairman of the Correctional Officers Caucus, I rise in support of this amendment. I rise today in support of the Moran-Wolf-Morella amendment. As a co-chairman of the Congressional Correctional Officers Caucus, I am acutely aware of the placement of thousands of correctional jobs in our Federal prisons on the FAIR Act inventory. Here's a list from the Department of Justice--it lists 10,260 DOJ jobs that are quote-unquote ``commercial activities.'' Of those ten thousand jobs that the OMB would have us turn over to the private sector, 7,670 are from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Quite frankly, anyone who says that a job in a prison is ``not inherently governmental'' has not spent enough time in a prison. I worked in a state correctional facility in Ohio for eight years and I will not accept that OMB should be able to force a prison to replace its trained correctional workers with untrained, private-sector cooks or night-shift janitors just because the cost is cheaper. Prisons can be dangerous, and workers cannot switch between private-sector jobs and prison jobs without risking their own safety and that of others. Now, more than ever, with our increased focus on terrorism, we need trained, Federal, correctional workers in our Federal prisons. These prisons often serve as administrative holding pens for the INS and Federal courts for terrorists.”