Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by Attorney General Eric Holder at the Vera Institute...

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by Attorney General Eric Holder at the Vera
Institute of Justice's Third Annual Justice Address

NEW YORK, July 9 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following is being released by
the U.S. Department of Justice:

Laurie, thank you for that wonderful introduction. When I asked Laurie to
come back to the Justice Department to lead our Office of Justice Programs, I
was keenly aware of how much she would have to give up to join us. Not only
did she take leave from the University of Pennsylvania, but she also had to
give up her Chair of Vera's Board of Trustees. I know that the polite thing
to do would be to apologize for taking her from you - but the truth is, your
loss is our gain. We hope that Laurie stays at the Department for a long
time.

It is a privilege to join you this evening as your keynote speaker. Your past
speakers have been Nicholas Katzenbach and James Comey, who reflected on the
law after their government service. Perhaps one day I might have that kind of
conversation with you as a former Attorney General. For now, I stand before
you in a different posture, to share some ideas about how I think the American
people can best be served by the Department of Justice going forward.

The Vera Institute of Justice has been an extraordinary partner to government
in the administration of justice. I thank you in particular for your work
with the federal government across a range of issues - from your contributions
to the national commission to eliminate prison rape to the administration of
Legal Orientation Programs for non-citizens in immigration proceedings. Your
practical, rational, data-driven, results-oriented approach can best be
described as post-partisan. In the five months that I have served as Attorney
General, I have tried to take that same approach, and that is what I would
like to talk about this evening: how we can move past politics and ideology in
order to get smart on crime.

Getting smart on crime requires talking honestly about which policies have
worked and which have not, without fear of being labeled as too hard or, more
likely, as too soft on crime. Getting smart on crime means moving beyond
useless labels and instead embracing science and data, and relying on them to
shape policy. And it means thinking about crime in context - not just
reacting to the criminal act, but developing the government's ability to
enhance public safety before the crime is committed and after the former
offender is returned to society.

It is imperative that we get smart on crime now, for much has changed since
some of our basic, governing assumptions about criminal law enforcement were
developed. In the middle years of the twentieth century, America went through
an historic increase in crime and illegal drug use. In the 1960s and 70s, the
overall crime rate increased more than five-fold. Violent crime nearly
quadrupled. The murder rate doubled. And heroin, cocaine and other illegal
drug use surged.

Many lawmakers in the 1980s responded by declaring, in rhetoric and in
legislation, that we needed to get tough on crime. States passed
truth-in-sentencing and three strikes and you're out laws. Some state parole
boards became more cautious, while other states eliminated discretionary
parole altogether. The federal government adopted severe mandatory minimum
sentencing laws, eliminated parole, and developed the federal sentencing
guidelines.

The federal government and states spent billions of dollars in new prison
construction. The result was dramatic: the number of inmates in American
prisons has increased seven-fold since 1970. Today, one out of every 100
adults in America is incarcerated - the highest incarceration rate in the
world.

Few would dispute that public safety requires incarceration, and that
imprisonment is at least partially responsible for the dramatic drop in crime
rates nationwide in recent decades. By 2007, the nation's violent crime rate
had dropped by almost 40% from its peak in 1991. But just as everyone should
concede that incarceration is part of the answer, everyone should also concede
that it is not the whole answer. Simply stated, imprisonment is not a
complete strategy for criminal law enforcement.

To begin with, high rates of incarceration have tremendous social costs. And,
of course, there also is the matter of simple dollars and cents, and the
principle of diminishing marginal returns. Every state in the union is trying
to trim budgets. States and localities are laying off teachers and canceling
sanitation department shifts, but in almost all cases, spending on prisons
continues to increase. Not only is this unsustainable economically, but it is
also not proving to be effective at fighting crime. For while prison building
and prison spending continue to increase, public safety is not improving.
Since 2003, spending on incarceration has continued to rise, but crime rates
have flattened. Indeed, crime rates appear to have reached a plateau, and no
longer respond to increases in incarceration.

So what can we do to lower the crime rate further, to make American
communities safer, to get smarter on crime? We need new tools - and one way
to develop new tools is to look several steps past getting people into prison,
and to consider what happens to people after they leave prison and reenter
society.

We know that offenders who have participated in the federal Bureau of Prisons'
residential drug abuse treatment program are 16% less likely to be
re-arrested, have their supervision revoked, and be returned to prison, than
similar inmates who did not receive such treatment before their reentry into
society. They are also less likely to use drugs once released. We also know
that inmates who work in prison industries are 24% less likely to commit
crimes again, compared to inmates who have not participated in such programs -
which, incidentally, operate at no cost to the taxpayer. The Bureau of
Prisons' educational programs designed to address educational deficiencies -
ranging from Adult Basic Education to high school level classes - are also
effective in reducing recidivism: inmates who participate in these programs
are 16% less likely to commit crime again as compared to their
non-participating peers. And inmates who are released through halfway houses
are more likely to be gainfully employed, and therefore less likely to commit
crime again, as compared to inmates who are released from prison directly to
the community.

That recitation of statistics might not sound exciting, but what we do with it
is. We rely upon evidence-based methods to innovate in agriculture,
transportation, environmental safety, and public health - and it is my belief,
that the Department of Justice likewise should embrace modern, evidence-based
methods for developing policy.

In particular, it is critical that we work to develop policies - rooted in
data - to address what happens after incarceration. For the statistics I
cited are even more compelling when coupled with another fact: most crimes in
America are committed by persons who have committed crime before. About 67%
of former state prisoners and 40% of former federal prisoners are rearrested
within three years. Logically, if we reduce the recidivism rate, we will
directly lower the crime rate. Even a modest reduction in recidivism rates
would prevent thousands of crimes and save hundreds of millions of taxpayer
dollars. In other words, being smart on crime means understanding that our
work does not end when prison time begins.

Smart risk assessments can identify which offenders can safely remain in their
communities and which require continued detention and more intensive
supervision. Data analysis can determine which offenders pose a higher
recidivism risk based on the type of crime the offender was charged with and
the offender's prior record. For example, risk assessments might determine
that removing a 16-year-old, non-violent, first-time offender from his family
and school and placing him in a juvenile detention facility is a bad idea
because it would actually increase the risk of recidivism, and waste taxpayer
dollars besides.

One specific area where I think we can do a much better job by looking beyond
incarceration is in the way we deal with non-violent drug offenses. We know
that people convicted of drug possession or the sales of small amounts of
drugs comprise a significant portion of the prison population. Indeed, in my
thirty years in law enforcement, I have seen far too many young people lose
their claim to a future by committing non-violent drug crimes.

One promising, viable solution to the devastating effect of drugs on the
criminal justice system and on American communities is the implementation of
more drug treatment courts. Drug court programs provide an alternative to
incarceration for non-violent offenders by focusing on treatment of their
underlying addiction. Program participants are placed in treatment and
routinely tested for drug use - with the imposition of immediate sanctions for
positive tests balanced with suitable incentives to encourage abstinence from
drug use. These programs give no one a free pass. They are strict and can be
extraordinarily difficult to get through. But for those who succeed, there is
the real prospect of a productive future.

New York has been a leader in this area, diverting some non-violent offenders
into drug court programs and away from prison, and extending early release to
other non-violent offenders who participate in treatment programs. And while
national prison populations have consistently increased, in New York the state
prison population has dropped steadily and has 12,000 fewer inmates now than
it did in 1999. And since 1999, the overall crime rate in New York has
dropped 27%. Other states have followed New York's example. And most
importantly, studies show significant reductions in re-arrests, from about 15
to 30 percentage points, for drug-court participants as compared to criminals
simply incarcerated.

Furthermore, smart criminal justice policies are not, of course, exclusively
reactive - we can also use data and evidence-based methods to prevent crime
before it occurs. We have models, for example, in New York's CompStat
program: it uses data to map where crime is most likely to occur, deploy
police to those areas to disrupt criminal activity, and evaluate the
effectiveness of the enforcement strategies. We can also extrapolate from
available data to identify youth that are highly at-risk to commit crimes in
the future. For example, it seems that children who are exposed to domestic
violence at home are more at-risk. Once we have identified at-risk youth, we
can intervene with targeted programs, and I have asked the Department to make
a priority of focusing on the issue of children exposed to violence. There is
much work to be done in this area, but the underlying premise is already
clear: we need to understand crime in context in order to prevent it - and
with better understanding and more information, we can develop new approaches
to old and seemingly intractable problems.

Although this Administration is still young, we have already started to put
into practice what I believe is a data-driven, non-ideological, post-partisan
approach to crime. For example, I have asked attorneys throughout the
Department to conduct a comprehensive, evidence-based review of federal
sentencing and corrections policy. Specifically, the group is examining the
federal sentencing guidelines, the Department's charging and sentencing
advocacy practices, mandatory minimums, crack/powder cocaine sentencing
disparities, and other racial and ethnic disparities in sentencing. The group
is also studying alternatives to incarceration and strategies that help reduce
recidivism when former offenders reenter society. We intend to use the
group's findings as a springboard for recommending new legislation that will
reform the structure of federal sentencing.

I have also called upon the Department to focus on another part of the
criminal justice system: the very difficult issue of indigent defense.
Putting politics aside, we must address the fact that, simply put, there is a
crisis in indigent defense in this country. Resources for public defender
programs lag far behind other justice system programs, constituting only about
3 percent of all criminal justice expenditures in our nation's largest
counties. In many cases, contract attorneys and assigned lawyers receive
compensation that does not even cover their overhead. We know that defenders
in many jurisdictions carry huge caseloads that make it difficult for them to
fulfill their legal and ethical responsibilities to their clients. We hear of
lawyers who cannot interview their clients properly, file appropriate motions,
conduct fact investigations, or do many of the other things an attorney should
be able to do as a matter of course.

This growing crisis is troubling not just because of the government's
constitutional duty to ensure the right to counsel. When defendants fail to
receive competent legal representation, their cases are vulnerable to costly
mistakes that can take a long time to correct. Lawyers on both sides can
spend years dealing with appeals arising from technical infractions and
procedural errors. When that happens, no one wins. Addressing the American
Council of Chief Defenders last month, I committed to several steps to help
improve the indigent defense system, including hosting a national conference
with the goal of developing a set of best practices and practical solutions.

I have also made it clear that this Department of Justice will use the
available data to improve our handling of the forensics sciences - such as
fingerprints, trace evidence, firearms matching. We are studying a recent
report from the National Academies of Science that diagnosed problems in the
use of forensics sciences and suggested ways forward, and we are working with
our partners in the Executive Branch and Congress to act on the report's
insights and recommendations. Our goal is to ensure that forensic science is
practiced at the highest level possible, and always in the pursuit of truth.
Because we put a premium on truth-seeking - because, indeed, this
Administration is committed to using the best science possible whenever
possible, including in criminal justice - I also believe that defendants
should have access to DNA evidence in a range of circumstances. DNA testing
has an unparalleled ability to exonerate the wrongfully convicted as well as
to identify the guilty. Federal law already guarantees access to DNA evidence
held by the federal government under specific conditions, and I hope that all
states will follow the federal government's lead on this issue.

Many of the things I have mentioned in these remarks are still in early stages
or under review. There are numerous areas I have not even mentioned - for
example, the prevention and detection of economic crimes and on-line crimes -
where we can similarly get smarter with a research-driven approach. I am
already certain, however, that change is both necessary and it is possible -
if we are willing to make it. Challenges have changed with time: Prison
populations are at an all-time high and still climbing, yet the crime rate is
no longer declining. States are in serious financial distress. But
opportunities have changed too. We are able to compare the cost and
suitability of different criminal justice strategies. We no longer must
choose between more crime and more prisons: we can reduce crime rates and
reduce our dependence on incarceration, and at the same time increase the
integrity of our criminal justice system. We can harness science and data to
tackle emerging problems and also to preserve our foundational principles.
The more we know, the better we can do, the more sophisticated we can be.
With the help of the scholars and experts in this room, state and local law
enforcement, corrections officials across the country, judges, victims of
crime, and always with the fine work of attorneys at the Department of
Justice, there is no question that a smarter and better criminal justice
system is within our grasp.

Thank you very much.

SOURCE U.S. Department of Justice

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