First Step Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BOOKER. Would the Senator yield?

I wish to express my gratitude on the floor. I have been here in the Senate for almost exactly 5 years, and Senator Durbin and Senator Grassley have been nothing short of heroic, in my eyes, in consistently working the entire 5 years to get us to this point where we are, to use a football metaphor, on the 1-yard line in getting this over. Obviously, Senator Mike Lee and Senator Whitehouse have also been in that category.

You did an incredibly good job of laying out that we have amendments that go counter to the victims groups and to their interests and to their well-being, their often emotional well-being, being retraumatized, forced to be back out there.

But I want to ask you a question about that last amendment Cotton is making about that so-called exclusion list, people who won't be eligible for particular programs before they are released. In other words, there are programs they can enroll in while they are in prison that would ultimately shave a little bit of time off their sentences. These programs, though--I would like you to maybe go into them because they are evidence-based programs that actually lower recidivism rates, and they save taxpayer money. The idea behind this--maybe you could explain it--is to make sure that when people are released, they don't come back. In other words, if they don't get into these programs, it is more likely that those very people he has tried to exclude might come back. Can you explain why these programs are important and why they make sense?

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source