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Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, 5 years ago, Congress came together to pass the First Step Act, the most important criminal justice reform legislation in a generation. I am happy to come to the floor today with my colleague and friend Senator Booker of New Jersey and celebrate this momentous anniversary.

The First Step Act passed the House and Senate by overwhelming bipartisan majorities and was supported by a broad coalition from across the political spectrum, including former President Donald Trump, who signed it into law. I was proud to champion this landmark legislation with the help of Senators Booker, Grassley, and Lee. It took months of bipartisan negotiation and painful compromise, but the net result was a historic victory that significantly improved our system of justice.

I am thankful for the tireless efforts of many dedicated advocates who never gave up hope that this law could be passed. It was a dramatic change to finally acknowledge that just being tough on the so-called war on drugs was not enough.

I often think back to my early days in the House of Representatives, during the 1980s, when the crack epidemic was devastating America. I vividly remember, in 1986, when the Nation reeled from the news that a Maryland basketball player named Len Bias had died from a heart attack induced by cocaine. All of the evidence points to it having been powder cocaine. Somehow, his death, nevertheless, became a public symbol of the crack epidemic.

Members of Congress were desperate to do something to stop the despair caused by drugs in our communities and to punish the dealers who were trafficking this new, highly addictive product. So we passed legislation, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, that established mandatory minimum sentences for distribution of specific quantities of drugs. We thought we would clearly deter people from selling drugs by imposing tougher--tougher--sentences for larger quantities.

The law imposed much tougher sentences for crack cocaine offenses than for powder cocaine offenses. An individual would receive a minimum--minimum--5-year Federal prison sentence for selling just 5 grams of crack, the same sentence provided for selling 500 grams of powder cocaine. At the time, we believed this 100-to-1 hit between sentences for crack and powder cocaine was the right thing to do. We were so frightened by the impact that crack was having in America.

But it became clear over the next 30 years that we were terribly, terribly wrong. Instead of the price of crack going up, after the law was passed because of reduced supply, the opposite occurred. The price went down. Even though we were locking up more people than ever for drug offenses, primarily African Americans, the amount of drugs on our streets and the number of addicts was increasing.

Years after the law passed, I met a young African American from Alton, IL, who told me the story of his sister Eugenia Jennings, also from Alton. As a child, she was abandoned and seriously abused. At the age of 15, she started using crack to dull the pain of her life. At the age of 23, Eugenia was convicted for trading a small amount of crack cocaine for clothing for her small children. She was sentenced to 22 years in a Federal prison--22 years.

She was a model prisoner while serving her sentence. While in prison, she developed leukemia. I went to visit her in Greenville, IL, at the Federal correctional center. I will never forget the moment when I walked into the room and she was seated at the table. Then, she had been in prison for over 10 years.

She talked about how nice it was that she was in Greenville, close enough to Alton, IL, and that her children could visit. But she was afraid because her cancer was taking her to a prison hospital in Texas, and she wouldn't be able to see her children.

She said to me something I will never forget. She said:

``I don't know how much longer I am going to live, Senator. But I promise you this: If you can find some way to get me out of prison to be with my girls, I'll never do anything wrong again in my life.''

So I wrote a personal note, handwritten, to President Barack Obama, asking him to commute Eugenia's sentence. He did, just in time for her to see her eldest daughter graduate from high school. It was the thrill of her life.

Sadly, Eugenia died less than 2 years later.

Her story was tragic in so many ways, but it inspired me to keep working to pass legislation to help other individuals who had been unjustly sentenced by our overly punitive laws. It became my personal mission to correct these errors and fix a policy that was doing far more harm than good.

We took a big step in that direction in 2010, when President Obama signed into law a bill I authored, the Fair Sentencing Act. We reduced the 100-to-1 crack-to-powder-cocaine disparity to 18 to 1, but the Fair Sentencing Act was not retroactive, meaning that people were still serving long, disparate sentences on crack cases after the law was passed.

The First Step Act finally brought them relief, allowing them to be resentenced under the 18-to-1 ratio. The First Step Act also created an entirely new system programming in Federal prisons, designed to prevent incarcerated people from reoffending, with a chance for them to earn extra time in community confinement or supervised release at the end of their sentence, a strong incentive for them to do the right thing while in prison.

Last week, Senator Booker and I had the pleasure of meeting with a group of individuals from an organization called Families Against Mandatory Minimums. It was a great meeting. Many of the folks we met had been incarcerated under the harsh 1980s drug law. I spoke with them, including some from my own home State of Illinois.

One lady looked me in the eye, and she said: I was sentenced to life without parole, and without your bill, I would still be there.

Several of them noted they would still be in prison today, and now they were back with their families. They are back in their communities. They are spending time and contributing to our society.

The reforms in the First Step Act have been tremendously successful. I want to put these numbers on the record because they are so important. Of the 29,944 incarcerated people released under the First Step Act reforms through January 2023, only 12.4 percent have been arrested for new crimes. By comparison, the overall recidivism rate in the Bureau of Prisons currently stands at nearly 43 percent--12 percent versus 43 percent. The success of the overwhelming majority of individuals released under the First Step Act demonstrates that reducing the population in our overcrowded prisons can be done safely and effectively, and it is the right thing to do.

It is however, as its name, just the first step. To keep making our justice system fairer and our communities safer, we must continue reforming our outdated sentencing laws and provide opportunities for those incarcerated to successfully return. I hope Congress will take many more steps in this direction toward more just criminal sentences.

There is a natural impulse--Mr. President, you know it; you have heard it; you have seen it--when we talk about narcotics and drug crime, to say: If we can just get tough, if we get the message out there that we are going to impose tough sentences, then they will stop using.

We tried it. It was a disastrous failure when it came to crack cocaine.

Let's not just get tough. Let's get smart when it comes to sentencing people. Let's realize an addiction is more than just a curse in the person's life. It is a medical situation that can be resolved many times, and we can do it if we work conscientiously to make America safer.

I hope that Congress takes steps in that direction for more just criminal sentences and wiser responses to the crisis of substance abuse in America.

And now I am going to turn the floor over to a man who has become a close friend and an ally in this effort.

When he first came to Congress, Cory Booker may have been new to the Federal level of this issue, but he certainly had ample experience when it came to State and local enforcement of drug laws because of the fact that he was the mayor of the city of Newark, NJ, of which he reminds us frequently--as he should.

He has led on this issue personally in his home and in his community. He has seen the devastation it can cause. He has the same hope that I do--that rather than just say no, these individuals are given a chance to find a new way in life to overcome their addiction and become contributing members across America.

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague. He is outstanding as a Senator and extraordinary as a public speaker. I thank him very much for really driving the message home.

I am sure he would join me in adding our congratulations and thanks to dutiful staff members who worked without any kind of reluctance for months and years to get this project done.

I want to name two of them, and there are others--Joe Zogby, who is my chief of staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Dan Swanson, who is no longer serving with me. Those two did an exceptional job on this issue and showed the kind of patience that was absolutely essential for success. So I want to add those to the list of those I have thanked.

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