OFFICE OF SENATOR WEBB: Experts Testify Before Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Need for Senator Webb’s Bill to Overhaul America’s Criminal Justice System
- Momentum Grows for National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009

FROM THE OFFICE OF SENATOR WEBB

June 11, 2009

Contact:
Jessica Smith – 202-228-5185
Kimberly Hunter – 202-228-5258


Washington, DC – Experts from the legal and law enforcement communities urged passage Thursday of Senator Jim Webb’s legislation to comprehensively review and reform the nation’s criminal justice system.  

The testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs advances Webb’s National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009, S.714—at a time of growing national support for the legislation.  

The bill has twenty-nine cosponsors in the Senate, including many senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the endorsements of dozens of organizations and associations, representing a broad range of organizations. [For a full list of supporters, visit: http://webb.senate.gov/pdf/Endorsers.pdf]    

“We find ourselves as a nation in the midst of a profound, deeply corrosive crisis that we have largely been ignoring at our peril,” said Senator Webb in opening testimony before the Committee. “The national disgrace of our present criminal justice system does not present us with the horrifying immediacy of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, which in the end rallied our nation to combat international terrorism.  It is not as visibly threatening as the recent crash in our economy.   

Webb continued: “But the disintegration of this system, day-by-day and year-by-year, and the movement toward mass incarceration, with very little attention being paid to clear standards of prison administration or meaningful avenues of re-entry for those who have served their time, is dramatically affecting millions of lives, draining billions of dollars from our economy, destroying notions of neighborhood and family in hundreds of communities across the country, and – most importantly – it is not making our country a safer or a fairer place.”   

The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009, introduced by Webb in March creates a blue-ribbon commission charged with conducting an 18-month, top-to-bottom review of the nation’s entire criminal justice system and offering concrete recommendations for reform.

  “The goal of this legislation is nothing less than a complete restructuring of the criminal justice system in the United States,” said Webb. “Only an outside commission, properly structured and charged, can bring us complete findings necessary to do so.”

  Chief William Bratton of the Los Angeles Police Department testified on the bill: “I believe that such a debate is long overdue on the national level and I agree that we need a contemporary, widespread and far-reaching review of our entire criminal justice system in order to better serve and protect the public.  We must focus on preventing crime before it occurs rather than respond to it after it does.”

  “It is my heartfelt belief that the comprehensive, timely, and important bill proposed by Senator Jim Webb will go a long way toward addressing some of the severe inequities in the criminal justice system,” said Professor Charles J. Ogletree of Harvard Law School. “This effort should be pursued with great vigor to ensure that we not only hold offenders accountable, but that we implement criminal justice policies that are sensible, fair, increase public safety and make judicious use of our state and federal resources.”  

Pat Nolan, Vice President of the Prison Fellowship, testified: “My work has given me a close up view of our criminal justice system across the country, and I must tell you our prisons are in crisis. Corrections budgets are literally eating up state budgets, siphoning off money that could be going to schools, roads and hospitals. The crisis in our criminal justice system is national in scope, and only a national commission can conduct the type of review that will help guide us into better policies and safer communities.”

  “Reform experts who are serious about criminal-justice reform should draw encouragement from Senator Webb’s efforts to date to reach out to elected officials on both sides of the aisle and to criminal-justice reform advocates across the conservative-to-liberal spectrum,” said Brian W. Walsh, Senior Legal Research Fellow at the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies of The Heritage Foundation.  

Full testimony and a webcast of the hearing can be found by visiting the Senate Judiciary Committee website at: http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/hearing.cfm?id=3906  

For background materials on Senator Webb’s legislation, please visit: http:// http://webb.senate.gov/email/criminaljusticereform.html



For audio and video of the hearing, please contact Anne Hughes at Anne_Hughes@webb.senate.gov ///