Stop Sanctuary Policies and Protect Americans Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, over the past several months, law enforcement officers across our country have been shot, shot at, and killed without provocation, too often simply because they wear a badge. Violent crime and murders have increased across the country at almost alarming rates in some areas. Drug use and overdoses are occurring and dramatically increasing.

It is against this backdrop that we are considering a bill, or will be, to cut prison sentences for drug traffickers and even other violent criminals, including those currently in Federal prisons.

So we need to be asking about this carefully and with real caution, because as a prosecutor for a number of years, I know there are reasons we have people in jail. One is that it is just desserts. When somebody assaults another person, breaks into their house and robs them, uses weapons to rob a person of a thing of value, steals their automobiles, murders, rapes, and those kinds of things, they have to have a certain punishment or there is no real justice in the world. Just desserts is a legitimate reason to have punishment. It is not all economics. It is not all about whether they might or might not commit another crime. If you do a serious crime, you should do some time for it.

Another one is incapacitation. This is too little appreciated, but when you take a person who is committing crimes--and many of them commit many crimes--a study in California of their State prison system showed there was a huge number of those criminals who admitted committing as many as 170 crimes a year. We say that is not possible, but people would break into two or three cars a night. They would break into businesses, break into Coke machines, break into other things and cause all kinds of issues, such as lost time from work, costs to repair, disrupting lives, making people change the very nature of their business affairs because they are afraid of being robbed or burglarized. So those are things that occur.

Rehabilitation is a factor. The original idea was that in prison--we called it a penitentiary--where people do penance and hopefully they try to change their lives.

So I would just point out that those are some of the things we need to be aware of when we are talking about sentencing and what is appropriate, particularly in a time of rising crime.

People want Congress to represent their best interests and to protect them--people who do the right thing. They want their children to be able to play in the streets, walk around the block, see their friends, and not be afraid of some drug dealer or some gang member. Too often that is not possible in America. It got better, but it is getting worse, and we need to be aware of that as we consider legislation to improve our criminal justice system.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the amount of heroin seized at the southwest border has increased nearly 300 percent from 2008 to 2013, and I suspect the numbers are still going up. Heroin overdose deaths have increased 45 percent. That is huge. We went through a period of decline in all of this. It took 20 years. I was there. I worked with the Coalition for a Drug-Free Mobile, the Partnership For Youth. They volunteered hours and hours--teachers, school systems, gave their time and effort. We went from a period when 50 percent of high school seniors in 1980, according to a University of Michigan study, admitted to using an illegal drug, to less than 25 percent. It was cut by half. How many young people's lives stayed on track? How many people's lives were not led astray and destroyed by drug addiction as a result of that significant decline in drug use?

I think it needs to be said that the President should never have said smoking marijuana is like smoking cigarettes: Oh, I wish I hadn't done it. That is the kind of message people hear. Now we have States legalizing it, and they are already talking about decriminalizing it. It is a mistake. We have seen that experiment before. Lives are at stake.

The Drug Enforcement Administration called me recently and told me that 120 people a day are dying of a drug overdose in America. How many of them have serious brain injuries as a result of those overdoses? Our Presiding Officer, Dr. Cassidy, has been around emergency rooms. How many people are taken to emergency rooms and at what great cost to our communities? How many lives are disrupted? How many children are in broken homes? How many people had to leave their home because one spouse or the other has spent all the family money on drugs to support a habit? How many children have been abandoned, went to bed without food because of addiction in their family?

These are serious matters. We made tremendous progress. The murder rate in America dropped by over 50 percent since the 1980s when Ronald Reagan said ``just say no'' and started a War on Drugs. He appointed me as the U.S. attorney in Alabama. I know what we did. And the Federal Government led the way with tough sentencing, eliminating parole, targeting dangerous drugs in effective ways, and States and local governments followed.

I am worried about it. It is just tragic to me that we are making the same mistakes we made in the 1960s and 1970s. According to new data, 4.3 million people abuse or are dependent on marijuana. Marijuana is stronger today--several times stronger--than the marijuana of the 1960s, and it does impact people adversely.

The American Medical Association has issued a report that is unequivocal about the danger and the ramifications of the use of marijuana. According to the 2014 ``Monitoring the Future'' study, since 2007, lifetime, past year, past month, and daily drug use among 8th, 10th, and 12th graders combined have all increased.

Meanwhile, over the last several years, Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission all have taken steps to lessen punishment for, or altogether stop, the enforcement of laws that we passed over the years that led to this decline. They have been eliminated and weakened. I supported one of the big ones in Congress. I worked with Senator Durbin and we passed a bill that I think was justified and would not have done anything other than make the system better,

in my opinion, and fairer, but now we need to ask ourselves, what do we do next, if anything?

In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the sentencing guidelines that were enacted by Congress were not mandatory. This was a huge thing. In the early 1980s we passed sentencing guidelines and, depending on the severity of the crime and what the aggravating factors were at work, a person got more time or less time. It involved aggravating factors and mitigating factors, and it ended this idea that if you went to one judge, he would give you probation and if you went to another judge for the same crime, you would get 10 years, 15 years in jail.

So I think that is to be noted. This is a very significant reduction as a practical matter in the amount of time that a person would serve because of eliminating the mandatory requirement of the sentencing guidelines.

Then in 2010--this is a bill I worked on, the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine and made other changes that in many ways reduced sentences overall. It reduced sentences. It was designed because minority groups, particularly the African-American community--the drug of choice too often was crack and that had much higher sentences and it seemed to be unfair, and we fixed that to a large degree. It eliminated the mandatory 5-year minimum sentence--the mandatory 5 years without parole for possession of crack cocaine. I didn't think that was legitimate, Congress agreed, and we eliminated that requirement. It was being gotten around, and not many times were people being sentenced for simple possession of a small amount of cocaine. That was changed, and the Sentencing Commission then implemented an amendment to the sentencing guidelines that applied this retroactively. So people who had been sentenced under the previous procedures had those procedures reversed and then they got out of jail early--and a lot of people did. It resulted in early release of thousands of offenders.

In August of 2013, in a dramatic event too little appreciated, Attorney General Eric Holder ordered Federal prosecutors not to charge certain drug offenders with mandatory minimums, regardless of the quantity of drugs involved. He directed the prosecutors not to follow the law. Under the law, if you have a certain amount of drug use, you are supposed to serve at least a minimum mandatory sentence. This is different from the guidelines. This is a statutory requirement. And Attorney General Holder reversed previous attorneys general memoranda which directed that prosecutors should charge the main offense and they should be subject to the main penalty. That further reduced the number of people convicted and the amount of time they served.

Then the administration has declined to enforce Federal drug laws regarding marijuana in Colorado, Washington, and Oregon. It is still a Federal offense to deal marijuana in the United States. So even though a State doesn't have that law, the Federal Government does. They said: Well, if you don't enforce it, we won't enforce it--another relaxation of Federal law.

Then, according to the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, prosecutions for drug trafficking--the number of people actually tried and prosecuted for drug trafficking under the primary drug law, 21 U.S. Code section 841, has declined over 16 percent since 2009, and since President Obama took office, prosecutions under 21 U.S. Code section 960, the Import-Export Act, have declined by 30 percent over that time period.

We haven't had those kinds of reductions in drugs that are imported into the United States. We don't have fewer drug distribution networks. We have more. Those prosecutions shouldn't be declining. We didn't reduce the number of prosecutors working in the U.S. Attorneys' offices.

Attorney General Holder ordered Federal prosecutors to refrain from objecting to defendants' requests in court for shorter sentences. He said: Don't object to their requests for shorter sentences. Less than a month later, the Sentencing Commission voted to reduce sentences for an estimated 70 percent of Federal drug trafficking offenders, including those who possessed a firearm, committed a violent crime or had a prior conviction, decreasing their sentence an average of 11 months--almost 1 year. An estimated 6,000 will be released from Federal prison beginning November 1, and about 40,000 will be eligible for early release in the coming years.

President Obama has commuted the sentences of 89 Federal drug offenders, including crack cocaine distributors--some convicted of dealing more than 10 pounds of crack, which is hundreds of thousands of dollars in value, while others were convicted of possession of a firearm in relation to a drug offense.

One of the things my office always did was it was sure to prosecute drug dealers who used guns while they were doing their nefarious crimes. I think it had an impact on the murder rate in America. Fewer dangerous drug dealers were carrying guns on a regular basis because they knew if they got caught, they would be taken to Federal court and be held another 5 years without parole for carrying a gun on top of their drug offense.

The President has announced that he plans to continue to grant clemency to Federal drug offenders through the end of his Presidency. Are we talking about thousands more?

All of this has led the Federal prison population to fall.

Now you have heard it said that we have this ever-growing number of people in the Federal prisons and that somehow it is wrong--there are about 200,000 people in Federal prisons.

We should talk about that. It is OK to talk about it, but we have to be careful. What I would say to you and what is too little appreciated, colleagues, is that we have already seen dramatic reductions in sentences in the last several years, far unlike what we had done in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

So the prison population has now started dropping. It has reached the lowest levels since 2005, 10 years ago. According to the Bureau of Prisons, the prison population of 200,000 has decreased over the last 2 years--by 5,300 in fiscal year 2014, last year. They project the population to ``further drop by 14,987 between FY2015 and FY2016''--another 15,000 decline--``particularly as a result of the retroactive sentencing guidelines change.'' Admissions to Federal prisons have declined every year since 2011. The number of people being admitted to the Federal prisons is going down, driven, I suspect, by the prosecutorial policies set by Attorney General Holder. They will continue to decline given the President's policy of directing prosecutors not to charge certain criminal offenses.

This is a very serious matter. We need to be careful as we analyze the legislation today. Crime is already rising at an alarming rate, so much so that it has prompted an emergency meeting of the Major Cities Chiefs Association in August. The New York Times recently reported that murders have increased sharply in many cities across the country since 2014, including Atlanta, up 32 percent--these are murders--Baltimore, up 56 percent, nearby; Chicago, up 20 percent; Houston, up 44 percent; Los Angeles, up 11 percent; New York, up 9 percent; Milwaukee, up 76 percent; Minneapolis, up 50 percent; New Orleans, up 22 percent; Philadelphia, up 4 percent; Dallas, up 17 percent; and Washington, DC, where we are, up 47 percent--murders. This trend, in my opinion, will continue.

Property crimes have also risen sharply throughout the country and even in small cities such as Abilene, Carson City, Portland, Ithaca, and Binghamton, NY.

I am afraid we are watching a repeat of history. A couple of generations ago, when we had an indeterminate sentencing system with no guidelines or required minimum sentences, virtually identical defendants received totally different sentences depending on the judge, and many received little or no incarceration. A nationwide crime wave ensued. It was a revolving door. People were arrested. They were released on bail. They came to court, and the case got continued. It got continued again, it got continued again, and the witnesses disappeared. They had a plea bargain, they got a little bit of time, and they served less than a third of the time they got. That is what was happening.

People say: Prison makes them worse. Do you remember those arguments? Well, in 1980, one out of four households in the United States had suffered a rape, robbery, burglary, assault, larceny or auto theft in the previous year. Crime was increasing in double-digits per year in the 1960s and 1970s, and we did not respond to it.

So then the Congress passed legislation that imposed mandatory minimum sentences on criminals convicted of the most serious Federal crimes and drug crimes to ensure that these perpetrators served at least a fixed amount of time in prison. Every drug dealer knew it and came to know that if they were caught, they were going to serve real time and they were not going to talk their way out of it. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act was passed, and the Armed Career Criminal Act, which had mandatory 15-year penalties. Career criminals carrying guns and committing serious crimes were hammered. It targeted career criminals--the kind of people who kill people to carry out their crimes. Drug trafficking fell into that category. Congress also established sentencing guidelines that required judges to sentence within certain ranges and calculate factors and create objectivity, so that one poor person got the same sentence as some rich person with a highly paid lawyer. The rationale was and remains three-fold: to deter offenders from engaging in further criminal behavior, to ensure that a meaningful period of time elapsed for the offender to become rehabilitated, and to incapacitate the offender from harming law-abiding citizens.

How many people do you know that would rape someone? How many people do you know that would likely take a gun and murder somebody? The more of those that are in jail serving time, the less people are going to get murdered. It is mathematics, and that is really what happened since 1980 with the increasing number of people being incarcerated. This idea worked.

According to the FBI statistics, the rate of violent crimes--murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault--was reduced by more than 50 percent from 1991 to 2013. That is when these sentences were beginning to be understood and were impactful. Property crimes, burglary, murder, larceny, and motor vehicle thefts dropped by a similar measure.

Over time, prison penalties fairly and systematically applied mean that less crime and fewer innocent people are burglarized, robbed, raped or murdered. Scholars have estimated that the increase in the size of our prison population has driven down crime rates by at least 25 percent.

Professor Matt DeLisi of Iowa State University testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that criminal justice research shows that ``releasing 1 percent of the current [Federal prison] population would result in approximately 32,850 additional murders, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, thefts, auto thefts, and incidents of arson.''

Well, we have had more than a 1 percent increase already. The great criminologist and Professor James Q. Wilson said:

A high risk of punishment reduces crime. It just does.

If you are talking about the classroom or on the football field, if the flag is thrown every time somebody clips, they quit clipping. If it is not thrown, you will still see it.

In 2011 the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling in Brown v. Plata, that California was required to reduce its prison population to ease overcrowding. In dissent in that case, Justice Alito recalled a prisoner-release program in Philadelphia in the 1990s:

Although efforts were made to release only those prisoners who were least likely to commit violent crimes, that attempt was spectacularly unsuccessful. During an 18-month period, the Philadelphia police arrested thousands of these prisoners for committing 9,732 new crimes. Those defendants were charged with 79 murders, 90 rapes, 1,113 assaults, 959 robberies, 701 burglaries, 2,748 thefts, not to mention thousands of drug offenses.

I wish it weren't so. I wish we could have these programs. I have seen them since my time in law enforcement in 1975, as a young prosecutor. Year after year, people have come forward with plans that sound so good, and they have been tried before. But they never work out nearly as well as people promote. Trust me. If there was any quick fix, it would already have been done all over America. People don't--States don't want to spend money on prisons. But the truth is that people who tend to be criminals tend to continue to be criminals and commit crimes. We ignore too often the pain, the destruction and the damage it does to innocent people who are afraid to have their children experience the turmoil of crime.

Now is not the time to move too fast to further reduce penalties without careful thought. Before we rush to judgment about undoing Federal sentencing laws, we must consider the results of what has already happened--how much reduction we have already seen. We have a responsibility to the public to examine every aspect of the legislation that may be coming forward and be introduced in committee, which could greatly impact the everyday lives of Americans for years to come. To that end, we must have a good hearing on it. We need to study what experts have told us and what history tells us about crime.

It would be so wonderful if we could do a drug treatment program and people would not commit crimes again. It would be so wonderful if we could have an in-prison educational program that people could take and somehow have a significant reduction of crime rates. There are all kinds of ideas that have been tried over the years, and some of them may have a benefit. Some of them have some benefit, but none of them have produced dramatic alterations in the rate of recidivism or repeat of criminal acts. One study a number of years ago concluded that when a person comes out of prison, they make a decision. It is an individual, personal decision about whether they are going to continue with criminal activity or not. Some of them make it because the prison was a bad place and they don't want to go back. Some of them make it because they have had a religious experience. Some of them make it because they took advantage of an online or education course and decided they are going to do something better for their lives. But it is an individual decision, and we have not found it possible to somehow impact the psyche of people in prison so that we can consistently reduce the likelihood that they will return to crime. We have to understand that.

If somebody has a plan that shows me that, I would like to see it.

Mr. President, I thank the Chair for allowing me to share these thoughts. We are at a very important time in criminal justice, and we need to get it right.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

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