The top Republican and Democrat on the House Government Oversight Committee came together on Tuesday to point to the recent violence in Baltimore as a reason to rally behind criminal justice reform.
Committee chair Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said that the unrest—sparked by the killing of a black man in police custody—highlights rot in the system with widespread consequences.
“I watched my community in Baltimore torn apart after the tragic death of one of my neighbors, Freddie Gray,” said Cummings, who was born in Maryland’s biggest city and still represents part of it. “To see it erupt into violence underscored the urgent need to examine systemic problems facing our criminal justice system at its core,” he said.
Chaffetz said an emphasis on punishment is one of those problems, and suggested his own relationship with Cummings helped him arrive at that conclusion.
“One of the more impactful things I did as a member of Congress was to go visit Congressman Cummings’ district,” he said, citing a meeting they had with former inmates trying to live their lives legally.
“They had been convicted and sentenced, and served those sentences, but now had a hard time getting out of that box,” Chaffetz said. “You’re a 22 year-old male with a felony on your record. What are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to get a job? You wanna right your life, you paid your debt to society, then what do you do?”
“We better address that if we wanna make this country the premier country that I know that it is,” he added.
Some of the solutions suggested by Chaffetz and Cummings—an emphasis on rehabilitation and non-incarceration–were also lauded later Tuesday by President Obama, during a speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. On Monday, the President had also commuted the sentences of 46 federal drug offenders—about one third of them were serving life sentences.
“These men and women were not hard criminals,” Obama said in a video message. “Their punishment did not fit the crime.”
Appearing before the House Government Oversight committee to discuss the tack reforms should take were Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas)—a pair that has worked in the upper house to legislate reductions to America’s world-beating prison population.
Cornyn said that the US could learn from his own state, which, when faced with a budget shortfall eight years ago, sought to reduce its prison population through conditioned alternatives to incarceration.
“We’ve always been tough on crime in Texas, but in 2007 they decided to get smart on crime,” he said, claiming the initiatives saw the incarceration and crime rates drop by 9.4 percent and 16 percent, while saving the state $2 billion through the closure of three prisons. “Instead of building more prisons in hoping that would somehow fix the problem, they decided they would try a different approach.”
Cornyn then praised fellow Senate Judiciary Committee member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) for working with him on a bill designed to replicate successful state reforms on the federal level. Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), however, opposes the legislation and described it from the floor of the Senate in March as a product of the “leniency industrial complex.”
Booker–in a lengthy statement chronicling the profound impact of a hardline law and order agenda–implored immediate action. He said that the US poverty rate, between 1980 and 2004, would be “20 percent lower if not for mass incarceration.
Booker also compared Americans’ problems with the sprawling prison system today to the Founding Fathers’ grievances with the British royal system, calling the contemporary woes “a cause enough for revolutionary spirit in America.”
