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“CRIME IN AMERICA” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the Senate section on pages S10576-S10578 on Sept. 16, 1996.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
CRIME IN AMERICA
Mr. COVERDELL. Mr. President, undoubtedly, Senator Dole's emphasis on taking crime head-on is an outgrowth of a circumstance over the last 3 years that has just turned sour on us. It has been alluded to, but I want to cite some of the facts that have developed in the last 36 months.
First of all, I want to make it clear that there can be no doubt about it that, in the last 36 months, the United States has found itself, once again, in a massive drug epidemic. It is fueling and will continue to fuel crime. Just to cite this, in the last 36 months, marijuana use is up 105 percent, LSD is up 130 percent, cocaine up 160 percent. Somebody in the administration suggested that, actually, drug use is down. I have no idea where that data is coming from, but it must be a single source, because every other source has documented that drugs were up in virtually every category. The sad thing, Mr. President, is that they are kids.
In the last epidemic, during the 1960's and 1970's, it was a target group from about 16 to 20. It has dropped, which is such a tragedy. Now the ensnarement is occurring at age 8 to 13. This country is going to feel the impact of that for a long, long time. One in every 10 kids is using drugs.
Drug prosecutions are down 12 percent. This administration cut 625 drug agents. Federal spending on drug interdiction has been cut by 25 percent. The drug czar's office was reduced by 83 percent. On the list of national security threats, compiled by the National Security Council, this administration moved illegal drugs from No. 3, as a threat, to No. 29 out of 29.
Now, Mr. President, can there be any wonder that our children are getting the wrong message, and that they no longer think drugs are a risk, and that, therefore, they are using them in record numbers, and that, therefore, we have an epidemic, and that, therefore, we are having the emergence of a new crime wave?
Mr. President, we have been joined by one of our colleagues that has been in the center of this controversy during his entire time, which is since 1994. The distinguished Senator from Michigan is already making an impact in this area of vital concern across our country.
I yield up to 15 minutes to the Senator from Michigan.
PRESIDENT CLINTON'S VETO BY LAWYERING
Mr. ABRAHAM. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia, again, for his efforts to bring us together here to focus on various vital matters before the Senate and before the American people.
Mr. President, I have taken the floor on several previous occasions to discuss the problem of abusive prison litigation and this Congress' efforts to attack that problem.
The last time I did so was April 19, 1996. At that time, I expressed my disappointment that President Clinton had just vetoed the Commerce-
Justice-State appropriations bill.
Contained in that bill was the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a carefully crafted set of provisions designed to stem the tide of prison litigation.
In my view, this was a very important piece of legislation. Lawsuits by prisoners and lawsuits over prison conditions were completely out of hand.
One figure captures the situation very well. In fiscal year 1995, prisoners--inmates in prison--filed 63,550 civil lawsuits in our Federal court system. That is a little over one-quarter of all the civil lawsuits filed in Federal courts that year. It's also far more than the 45,788 Federal criminal prosecutions initiated that fiscal year.
In short, Mr. President, we saw, in fiscal year 1995, prison lawsuits outnumber prosecutions under our Federal system and account for one-
quarter of all the lawsuits brought in this country in the Federal system.
One prisoner sued because he had been served melted ice cream. For this he claimed $1 million in damages. Fortunately, the judge ruled that the right to eat frozen ice cream was not one of those the Framers of the Constitution had in mind.
Another sued because when his dinner tray arrived, the piece of cake on it was ``hacked up.''
A third sued demanding LA Gear or Reebok ``Pumps'' instead of Converse tennis shoes. This kind of abusive litigation is not only frivolous, it costs money and cost the taxpayers a lot of money.
The National Association of Attorneys General estimated that the States were spending about $81 million to battle cases of the sort I just described--this even though the States win 95 percent of these cases early in the litigation for reasons that are obvious.
We were determined to do something about this problem in the Congress, so as part of the Commerce-State-Justice appropriations bill in 1996 we passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act. This legislation charged prisoners a fee for filing any lawsuit, while making it possible for the prisoners to pay that fee in installments. If a prisoner filed more than three frivolous cases, however, the prisoner would no longer be able to pay the filing fee in installments. He or she would have to pay the full fee up front, unless a court found this would create imminent risk of bodily harm.
In addition, prisoners who filed frivolous lawsuits would lose their good time credits, thus making their stay in prison longer. And judges were given authority to screen out frivolous cases on their own.
The legislation was designed to put an end to another aspect of the prison litigation problem: Seizure by Federal judges of the power to run prison systems. These seizures have consequences that range from the ridiculous to the disastrous.
In my own State of Michigan, judicial orders resulting from Justice Department lawsuits have resulted in Federal courts monitoring our State prisons to determine how warm the food is, how bright the lights are, whether there are electrical outlets in each cell, whether the prisoners' hair is cut by licensed barbers--this despite the fact that no court has ever found that any of these conditions regarding which it is giving orders violate the Constitution.
The orders issued by a judge in Philadelphia were even worse. There a Federal judge had been overseeing what had become a program of wholesale releases of up to 600 criminal defendants per week. Why? To keep the prison population down to what the judge considered an appropriate level. Thousands of the released defendants were then rearrested for new crimes including in one 18-month period 79 murders, 90 rapes, 959 robberies, 2,215 drug dealing charges, 701 burglaries, 2,748 thefts, and 1,113 assaults.
In the interest of justice and public safety, we wanted to stop this, and the means were simple and fully in keeping with everyone's rights. We simply required in that same Prison Litigation Reform Act that no judge could take over a prison without first holding that it had violated the Constitution and explaining how the order was necessary to correct the violation. We also directed that the judge give due regard to public safety in deciding what kinds of remedies to require. And we established stringent limits on the power of the courts to order prisoners released. Existing orders would have to meet these new standards. If they did not, they would have to be dissolved immediately on motion of the prison authorities, unless the court found that the orders were necessary to correct an on-going violation of a Federal right.
Unfortunately, President Clinton vetoed that legislation. At the time, the President said his veto had nothing to do with our prison litigation proposals. Instead, he said, he was vetoing the bill over other matters.
We took the President at his word and included our proposals in a second piece of legislation. This time, the President signed the legislation. Unfortunately, the President's top ranking officials in the Department of Justice seem intent on inventing a new kind of veto, veto by lawyering.
This effort started almost as soon as the ink from the President's signing pen was dry. A mere 11 weeks after signing the bill, his Department of Justice was filing briefs all around the country that would undermine the clear intent of our legislation. The briefs claimed that, far from requiring the courts to stop running the prisons for the comfort of prisoners, that law authorized them to continue to do so indefinitely.
Thus, according to President Clinton's Justice Department, Federal judges should continue to tell Michigan how warm the food should be, how bright the lights have to be, and who should cut the prisoners' hair. And by the logic of their position, judges should also continue to dictate prison population size and order excess prisoners released--
this even if the Constitution contains no such requirement and even if the release orders jeopardize public safety. At least they should do this while they are investigating whether the prison ever violated any provision of the Constitution, an investigation that can take quite a bit of time.
The Department of Justice has come up with a host of legal theories to explain why the reform act should be read to require indefinite judicial supervision of prisons for the benefit of prisoners. It is difficult to say which is more ludicrous, the original or the current theory. The original theory, now abandoned in the face of questions from Members of this body and the National Association of Attorneys General, was that the phrase ``violation of a Federal right'' includes violations of the very decrees the reform act was adopted to end.
The current theory stands on its head the reform act's requirement that existing decrees be automatically stayed 30 days after a motion to end one has been filed unless there has been a final ruling on the motion.
According to the current Justice Department theory, this requirement in fact means the decrees are not automatically stayed, and, indeed, that nothing should happen to them at all until the court conducts its own exhaustive inquiry as to whether conditions at the prison have ever violated any constitutional provision.
These theories are unpersuasive, Mr. President. Even Judge Harold Baer, the subject of some attention for his theory that running away from the cops gave no grounds for reasonable suspicion, rejected these theories and ended judicial rule at Riker's Island. Judges there had been dictating such crucial matters as the brand and exact concentration of cleanser to be used in certain areas.
The theories are ludicrous but the end result is not. These interpretations make a mockery of this Congress, they make a mockery of the law, and they make a mockery of the American people's desire to have prisons run to promote the public order, not to promote the comfort of our prisoners.
Further, even if they desperately try to protect existing decrees, President Clinton's Department of Justice continues to threaten exactly the kinds of lawsuits the reform act was supposed to end.
For example, a mere 4 days after President Clinton signed the reform act, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights threatened to sue Gov. Parris Glendening of Maryland over conditions in Maryland's supermaximum security prison. Supermaxes are reserved for the most dangerous prisoners, murderers and rapists who continue their violent behavior in prison.
What were the egregious unconstitutional conditions that led President Clinton's Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights to threaten suit? The fact that supermax prisoners are not allowed to socialize enough and are not getting enough outdoor exercise. The Department calls these conditions unconstitutional because they are the
``mental equivalent of putting an asthmatic in a place with little air to breathe.''
Fortunately, this particular veto by lawyering will ultimately succeed only if President Clinton's Justice Department persuades the courts to go along with it. I do not expect that it will.
So far the results are not promising for the Justice Department. So far, the judges who have decided these issues, interestingly, all of them Democratic appointees who had either taken over the running of prisons themselves or had inherited them from a predecessor who retired, rejected half the arguments urging them to retain control.
Mr. President, other parts of the Reform Act, the ones designed to cut back on individual prisoner lawsuits, which President Clinton's Department of Justice has no role in enforcing, already are showing their effects. Prisoner filings since the bill's enactment have declined sharply. Nevertheless, the Department of Justice, through its attempted veto by lawyering, is delaying and undermining the effectiveness of critical portions of the Reform Act. The Judiciary Committee will be holding a hearing on this matter next week.
It is my intention to propose an amendment to whatever proves to be the most appropriate legislation, either this year's Commerce-State-
Justice appropriations bill or perhaps another omnibus appropriations bill, that clarifies once and for all it is time for abusive prison litigation to end, whether it is brought by prisoners or by President Clinton's Department of Justice.
It is unfortunate we must clarify once again the clear intent of such recently enacted legislation. But public safety and the costs of our prison system are too important for us to allow this inappropriate veto by misinterpretation.
In short, I am here today to say that if we are truly serious about getting tough with crime, we ought to begin immediately to take the Prison Litigation Reform Act and administer it in the exact clear sense that Congress intended it to be administered.
That is not happening today. I am extraordinarily disappointed by it. I intend to be on the floor as often as necessary to bring about the correct interpretation of that legislation or to add new legislation that eliminates any possibility of misinterpretation in the future. Prisons should be tough time for prisoners and the rights of victims should take priority.
That is what I believe everybody in this Chamber is committed to doing, and if necessary we will have to enact more legislation to get the job done. But I am very disappointed in the actions of the Department of Justice to date because it is certainly inconsistent with what we demand and what the American people I believe want to see happen in the area of prison reform.
I thank the Senator from Georgia.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
Mr. COVERDELL. I wonder if the Senator from Michigan would stay just a moment to see if I get the sequence of these events down. We had a condition of legal frivolity--if you froze an ice cream or not. I think any American who would hear this just would be dumbfounded. But your legislation put an end to that and put an end to judicial management of prisons. And the President vetoed that.
Mr. ABRAHAM. That is correct.
Mr. COVERDELL. Then you came back again, passed the essence of this legislation, and he signed it, but his Justice Department has subsequently been engaged in an overt attempt to undo it?
Mr. ABRAHAM. That is accurate. I would say to the Senator from Georgia, we were told when the first veto occurred, because this legislation was included in a broader bill, that the legislation, the Prison Litigation Reform Act, was not the basis for the veto; that, in fact, it was supported.
When the second bill was signed, we assumed the Justice Department would seek to make sure the provisions of that Litigation Reform Act would be enacted and followed by the courts. Instead, what we have seen is the Department of Justice intervening in lawsuits in a way that would, in fact, preclude, rather than allow, States to extricate themselves from these various judicial circumstances where judges were running the prison systems with no clear evidence of a constitutional violation ever having occurred. Instead, we find the Justice Department finding ways to allow the judges to stay in charge and to allow for various things such as we have seen around the country, where these prisoner lawsuits are growing in number, where judges are requiring prisons and State authorities to expend millions of taxpayer dollars simply to ensure and improve the comfort of prisoners. We think that is the wrong direction.
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