Criminal Justice Reform

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I would like to give a few remarks about how I first became involved in the cause of sentencing reform within our Federal criminal justice system.

I will never forget when I first began to appreciate the full magnitude of this problem--the problem we face within a Federal criminal justice system that is sometimes too inflexible and sometimes doesn't allow judges to take into account the unique circumstances of each case. It was 2004. I was a Federal prosecutor, an assistant U.S. attorney in Utah. In some cases, I witnessed judges being forced by Federal law to impose punishments that simply, under any standard, did not fit the crime--first-time offenders sometimes being locked up for periods of time longer than some rapists or murderers, terrorists or kidnappers. These were real people--people with children, siblings, parents, spouses, and, of course, dreams for a better life. Yet in too many cases the so-called system that was supposed to correct their mistakes arguably compounded them. This system wasn't just wasting money, it wasn't just wasting physical material resources, it was wasting lives.

I know some in my party may view this as a progressive cause. I view it as a conservative one. Think about it. When there is a major problem tearing at our economy and our civil society--a problem that is threatening our most vulnerable families in our communities-- conservatives don't just shrug their shoulders and expect a bunch of outdated laws and bloated government bureaucracies to take care of it. We know better. Criminal justice reform doesn't call on conservatives to abandon their principles, it calls on them to fight for them.

This process and the conservative cause are all about making our communities--these little platoons, if you will, of service and cooperation at the very heart of our constitutional republic--safe and prosperous and happy. It is about basing our laws and basing our court procedures and our prison systems on a clear-eyed understanding of human nature--of how human beings respond, what brings out their better selves and what doesn't, about man's predilection toward sin and his capacity for redemption--along with an uncompromising commitment to human dignity.

Respect for the dignity of all human life, the basic dignity of the human soul, no matter how small or how weak, how rich or how poor, and the redemptive capacity of all sinners, no matter how callous, are the foundation for everything that conservatives purport to stand for. Our approach to policing and of punishment should be no different.

Moreover, as a conservative, I believe we ought to watch out anytime we give the government extraordinary powers, especially powers that deprive the individual of liberty. And nowhere is the deprivation of liberty more severe, more intense, more long-lasting than the deprivation of liberty that occurs when a person is locked up for years or for decades at a time, with no opportunity to progress, no opportunity to interact with family members, no opportunity to interact with the vibrant growing economy.

So when I got to the Senate and I was assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee, I started looking for partners--partners on both sides of the aisle--who shared my concerns with the Federal criminal justice system, shared my concerns with the way Federal minimum mandatory sentences were working. I started looking for partners on both sides of the aisle who shared this commitment to reform. Progress in this area is difficult, and for a long time the progress we made in this area was slow, just as any deliberative process often is.

I found an ally in my colleague, the senior Senator from Illinois. We teamed up and put together legislation. That legislation gradually started gaining some support. At first, it gained more support on the other side of the aisle than it did on my side of the aisle, but we were pleased with the progress that was made. But in the fall of last year, we struck an agreement and we started making more progress. We introduced a bill called the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act. Like most legislative compromises, it isn't perfect and it doesn't accomplish everything that every member of our coalition might wish we could accomplish, but it is an extraordinarily great start, and it proves it is possible to design our laws in a way that can balance the sometimes competing interests of retribution and rehabilitation, justice and mercy, the rights of victims and the rights of perpetrators.

The Sentence Reform and Corrections Act will expand the now-limited discretion of Federal judges so they can treat offenders like human beings and not mere statistics and punish them according to their particular circumstances. It would broaden the Federal safety valve, a provision of existing law that allows judges to sentence a limited number of offenders below the mandatory minimum. Contrary to what many of this bill's critics claim, this would not absolve offenders of their crimes, nor would it suddenly and indiscriminately release legions of violent predators into our communities. In fact, under this reform, the status of violent offenders would not change at all. They would remain ineligible for Federal safety-valve relief.

Our criminal justice system simply has to be flexible--at least flexible enough--to apply in many different situations. Prosecutors and judges need to have the ability to impose lengthy sentences on serious offenders who pose the greatest threat to public safety, just as they must have the ability to impose modest sentences on those who violate our laws but do not pose an ongoing threat to public safety. Whenever we interfere with the flexibility of either of these, we impair the effectiveness and the efficiency of our Federal criminal justice system. When we do that, we necessarily make our country less safe, rather than more safe.

So this bill would leave untouched the maximum penalty levels that exist under current law. It also would not eliminate any mandatory minimum sentences. Instead, it takes a targeted approach, reducing the harshest mandatory penalties and providing relief for low-level offenders with limited criminal history. It is this type of offender that helped draw my attention to this issue back in 2004, just as I described a few minutes ago.

One of the cases that was being handled by the office in which I worked, the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah, involved a young man named Weldon Angelos, a young man in his midtwenties, the father of two young children. He got involved in some criminal activity and was caught selling three relatively small quantities--dime-bag quantities--of marijuana to what turned out to be an informant. Because Mr. Angelos had a gun on his person at the time of these transactions, because of the way he was charged, and because of the way some of these provisions of law have been interpreted-- including a provision of law in 18 USC, section 924(c)--Mr. Angelos received a sentence of 55 years in prison.

Now, we may ask: What on Earth was this judge thinking? How could such a judge be so cruel, so arbitrary, so capricious as to sentence this young man to 55 years in prison for selling three dime-bag quantities of marijuana? The judge didn't have a choice. In fact, it was the judge who first drew my attention to the case because it was the judge who took the unusual-- the almost unprecedented, almost unheard of--step of issuing a written opinion prior to the issuance of the sentence, disagreeing with the sentence the judge himself was about to impose.

Then-Federal district judge Paul Cassell issued a lengthy opinion stating: This is a problem. This young man is about to receive a sentence that is excessive under any standard. It is a longer sentence than he would have received had he engaged in many acts of terrorism or kidnapping. So why are we sending this guy away until he is about 80 years old simply because of this minimum mandatory penalty? But, the judge said: This is a problem I cannot address. This is a problem I am powerless to remedy. Only Congress can fix this problem.

Those words have haunted me ever since then: Only Congress can fix this problem. So when I became a Senator in 2011, I still remembered those words. Those words continued to haunt me and continue to haunt me to this day.

Miraculously, fortunately, Mr. Angelos has been released through a variety of procedural maneuvers that I don't have time to address right now. He himself has been released. Many others are still in prison, under the same system, who have been locked up for years--decades--at a time, much longer than any reasonable person would think would be a just sentence. In fact, I have yet to meet a single person--Democrat, Republican, old, young, male, female--who believes that the sentence Mr. Angelos received was just. His story, his example is a good reason why we need to pass this bill.

Finally, this bill improves the quality of our Federal prisons. If it became law, it would increase access to vocational training, therapeutic counseling, reentry services, and other programs, so that we would have fewer first-time offenders turning into career criminals.

All of these are commonsense and, I believe, long-overdue reforms. But make no mistake. We are at the beginning, not the end, of this generation's story of criminal justice reform. As all of us know, the road to reform is long and full of setbacks and obstacles. Today's movement for criminal justice reform is no exception. But so long as the people here today are involved in this effort, I am confident we can together succeed where our prisons today often fail--in preparing offenders to reintegrate into their communities as productive and law- abiding citizens, as spouses, parents, neighbors, and employees, instead of career criminals.

We can fix this problem. This bill would begin to address this problem. But we need to bring this up. We need to have the opportunity to debate this, to discuss this, to vote on it, and to pass it.

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