Everyones information there will not be endorsements from the panelists today one important thing i want to clear up because i think it is important for context of this discussion is that the impression you have in organizations in working on this because in washington d. C. People say on the 6 00 news on the sunday talk shows where is the compromise . Where are the people in the middle that can split the baby and come up with legislation . I think that youre going to hear loud and clear from us but is this about compromise or is this about working towards shared values of principled people on both the left and the rig right . All the reasonable people thought this was the way to respond to everything. Left right coalitions and criminal Justice Reform have been successful. Work because curved led so if they led the same fight it wouldnt work. Im not sure i trust everybody but on a right Left Coalition there is no compromise on principles. We are working to do the same thing perhaps for different reasons, maybe different life experiences, different senses of what works and what doesnt. But when you sit down with the guys they are very serious about having criminal intent. They think this is an important thing. Other guys on the left who arent. There are people men and women on the left of principle who actually think rule of law matters and they get scared at the idea and that they are the target of the regulator. This is not right left get together and do something stupid but half way from where they want it to be. How do we get people out of prison so that they dont come back into prison. Cops come stop your car and say we think you might have drugs. Sell your car and now they take the money out of your bank account. Unless there is a conviction. If you are convicted and there was proceeds of bank robbery, good, but they shouldnt steal it unless you have been convicted of something. You saw the numbers. There is more money taken away from americans in civil Asset Forfeiture last year. It is a big deal and very sad big number. All of these reforms are ones people of principle can agree on. We dont agree on everything. There are a bunch of criminal justice things we are not working on. The ones we can agree and we can pass legislation it is not a question of sacrificing principles. There isnt a bill we look at there is other good stuff in there where that is not the deal here. This is not a compromise with stupid ideas. This is working with people who we can agree with. I want to reinforce that i cant imagine a bill passing that showed an increase in crime. There has been no evidence and the states with every reform that they have passed have done much better job of tracking things. Every proposal from the right and left and every bill that has gotten traction has improved Public Safety. I think that gets lost in the debate. Is this a compromise of the american conservative unions values or a chance to express your values and find them attractive to a broader audience . I think your first question related to the legislative process. Can left and right compromise . I just want to reiterate that so much of what is going on now within the criminal justice sphere is not legislative in orientation. It should lead politics and should control the people. That runs counter to founding of our nation as staff knows well we believe that sovereignty resides in the person and our whole constiitution begins with not just we the states or Founding Fathers but we the people. There is a conflict now where it is the left pushing the bureaucracy to move ahead of the people so it creates these laws outside of that political process. By political process i do not mean partisan process but how people govern themselves and as we have seen the legislative branch diminish in stature. One consequence we need to Congress Needs to take its rightful place in this process and we need to return to a place where members of congress can Work Together to address issues and take control of this process and take it back from the bureaucracy and then as members of Congress Move forward understand that everything they do needs to be based on the idea that the liberty of the individual is paramount and should be abridged when somebody committed something really bad. A prison fellowship we applaud things by saying amen. Amen. Right of crime is involved with coalitions involved with the states experienced. You have been around to see the results of the work and to see it play out. Right on crime is a principled player or do you feel willing to compromise principle. In terms of a spectrum of ideology we are not just groups meeting in the middle it is more of a u. We just happen to overlap on these particular issues. Great example of this coming from texas in 2015 prior to we were one of two states part of the criminal Justice System. For skipping school if you are asked to relate i always make the joke that this would have made me equivalent of bonnie and clyde. It it was one of two states that use that. Through a concerted effort between us on the right we were able to overlap on this particular issue with the same exact policy prescription. Neither of us compromising values. They are advocating for pay day lender reform and school to prison pipeline reform and things that we are not advocating for. On the criminal justice interlude into School Discipline we were 100 in agreement on. This is just one example of where we find that issue as opposed to changing what texas apple seed stands for. You see that across the spectrum. Another great example of that in michigan, you saw the center and the michigan chapter of aclu both shoulder to shoulder. This might show that the federal process tends to be a little detached from it. Both of them had natural constituencies that were affected by this law. You find these uncommon allies overlapping on these particular issues and then they move forward on that without changing the core of their beliefs. The next question it seems and the elephant in the room, if you will, for a member of congress you have a template that to be successful politically whether running as republican or democratic to lock people up for longer periods of time and more people in prison is the safe move. And to do the opposite is a political risky move. We are seeing evidence that these reforms reduce new crime. Has that changed the political dynamic in america . Is a no vote on reforms that address fiscal oversight, liberty issues, performance of the system . Whats a member of Congress Looking at when presented with bills that have the research and the support in front of them now . I think you hit the good and the bad on the head in that question. You have generally a policy issue. Criminal justice and criminal Justice Reform requires an elevator speech. It doesnt sound byte very well. However, here we have this litany of successes in the states and across a variety of programs. I think the fruits of it poetically speaking i think that is diminishing if not gone. You have seen in recent campaign cycles is where the crime has been invoked you tend to be a death rattle as opposed to a tip of the spear and when it has aired it has not found footing. You also see that all the polling that goes on in tandem, in texas we have been polling on this issue since 2013. 2013 we were a good five years on from our reforms in 2007. So we wanted to look at what about the hearts and minds . Are the hearts and minds with us on this program. We found that not only does the effect of people wanting to see common sense reform and conservative reform, not only did we see that very strongly supported we have seen very incredible effects on there. We actually saw that conservative identification actually predicted decent amount of ones affinity towards rehabilitation. You see that tends to drive a lot of public preference. That is not to say there isnt a punitive element to that. That is overshadowed by rehabilitation and then a lot of people say we need to have a strong deterrent system. When polled it gets at most 7 of people saying this should be the purpose of our criminal Justice System. Its not that they dont want to punish. They dont want to be its just that it is simply not what drives it. We find people two to one would rather spend money on effective rehabilitation programs than prison or jail . That persists across the board. This is in texas. This isnt what the average person thinks. This is what people in tyler think. This is what people think. I think when we look at what is going on in the states it is really giving a better sense of where the american political policy imagination is on this. Grover, you mentioned in your remarks already about the performance of governmental institutions and that conservatives have looked at going after the things they consider unnecessary or overstepping the proper role of government. This is an area where there is probably consensus on the right and left but there hasnt been a lot of scrutiny. My dear wife stacy at home sometimes better at summing up political issue s and policy issues than i am. She would simply say hospitals are supposed to make people healthier. Classrooms are supposed to make people smarter. The criminal Justice System is supposed to reduce crime, hold people accountable. What is your take on the performance of the system from taxpayers perspective . It hasnt done a very good job. It has gotten extremely expensive because people dont focus on it. We are spending 50,000 a year in california to put an adult in prison for 25,000. These are pretty significant numbers. If you can punish somebody and or rehabilitate them in ten years instead of 15 it is a lot of money that has been saved. If you can keep someone out of going to prison without keeping them away from crime that saves a whole bunch of money. The other thing you do is take a parent out of a household that could be earning support for the family. Doesnt do any good to have a fatherless household. Its very tough on kids. A lot of damage is done and we need to figure out how to punish crime, deter crime, work on rehabilitating people who have been bad and could do better at the least amount of damage, not just dollar cost but damage that we do. We dont do that well because we are not focussed on it. You guys passed a law against people raping each other in prison. For how long is that a punch line in jokes . Thats kind of sad. So i think if we focus on getting it done. We can do a lot better than we have done. Just one thing to add. Sometimes people say there was a spike in putting people in prison and maybe that is responsible for actually some of the drop in crime. Crime has continued to fall as we have moved away from spiebing the number of people in prison. What the drop in physical violence, physical crimes, rape, murder, assault, the drop in those crimes is matched with passage of concealed carry legislation in the states. They passed it state by state so you can compare states that did it ten years ago and states that did it 15 years ago and states that did it five years ago. That is where you are seeing people steal your car but in conceal carry states they are less likely to mug you. That is one reason you are seeing the drop. When people say the drop is because of crime they are trying to get away from the fact that you can track conceal carry passage and the number of people with conceal carry permits with the drop in physical violence. 14. 2 million americans with active permit im not surprised we have seen that kind of crime decrease. Thank you. I reserve my right to interject and i will say one thing before i go to dan on statistics of what grover said. One casualty of passage of locking more people up from early 70s up through a few years ago was the actual arrest and conviction clearance rate of murder in Violent Crime rates. Senator tom cotton cited in an arkansas paper that the Current System leaves 47 of the murders go without having arrests. No time served, no sentence, no probation, no reentry or collateral consequences. Where im from they run about 50 arrest rate in chicago. In 2012 running 30 arrest rate for murder in chicago. In the 60s before we started focussing on locking up more people for lesser crimes the arrest rate for murder was significantly higher, in some years into the 90 percentile. Statistically we have moved our focus away from where i think america would think the members of congress have focussed on who they are arresting. Dan, my question for you as the oldest and one of the most respected conservative voices in america, the american conservative union, from your Vantage Point how do you believe that we got here . What brought us to this point where we are having this debate in Congress Today . I was looking around the audience earlier and im not going to ask people to raise their hands, but how many of you are 50 years of age or older . Please dont raise your hands. My guess is that maybe a fourth or a fifth of you all are 50 years or older. For those of you under 50 you may not recall the time when the mantra changed from crime never pays to crime does pay. There was a period in our nations history was the focus you can get a crime and get away with it. Congress started to get tough on crime. That was a phrase that was often used in 70s and 80s. It was a phrase supposed to mean we are going to pursue justice for victims, but i think the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that we now have all of these cases where young man from detroit moving to hollywood. He wanted to be a video producer but atf boarded the train in new mexico and they couldnt figure out why a young black man had 40,000 on him. Atf thought he does not deserve to have 40,000. He must be up to no good. So atf took this young mans 40,000 under the Asset Forfeiture law. The young man has to hire a lawyer to prove his innocence. He is guilty. His money is guilty. His money was taken from him. We have swung so far in the other direction, the young man who earned 40,000 to begin his life has to hire lawyers and go through years of trial to get his money back. This is obscene. Fortunately we have people who are fighting hard to reform these asset fortunateture laws but across the board we have seen this extreme move where the individual is no longer thought to be sovereign where it is the state who controls the individual. I think this whole election that we are approaching is asking this question. Does government control the person or person control government. As a conservative i think we need to restore the rights of the individual. We need to pull back on these extreme criminal laws that turn everybody into a criminal. Thank you. We have a few more minutes together here i believe. Im getting a nod. And we are going to talk about some of the issues, not endorsing any specific bills but some of the things that the members of congress are confronted with today. I will give my commentary as somebody who reviews the bills in both chambers that by and large if you divided the criminal Justice System into three parts, sentencing, while somebody is paying their debt back serving their time, if you will, and then post release. Most of the congressional bills that are being debated and where there is a strong desire for passage or consideration this year before a new congress and new president relate to the first two either sentencing or the conditions of confinement, duration of confinement, when people can leave a federal institution. So you have heard the panelists talk about mensrea and civil Asset Forfeiture throughout their remarks but specific to those policies lets go a little briefer here with those two, with all the panelists talking about the importance of Congress Addressing those. We just have a little tutorial today on mens rea, the reason Hillary Clinton is putting what was supposed to be secure documents on email is okay and not a crime according to the fbi director is because, quote, there was no intentional misconduct in connection with that sorting effort. Now, i think that might be an extension a little bit far, but here you have a White Collar Crime being told that no intention, no crime. Somewhere between 300,000 federal regulations that can put you in prison and it is not attached to most of them. People in prison because they filled up paperwork wrong, plastic instead of paper when there was no reason to use either. Just the law. Step one, lets give everybody the hillary rule. All laws need mensrea. Everybody should be treated as well as Hillary Clinton including business men and women. The other is the overcriminalization issue. Its not in one of the bills but it was put together by the late senator specter and i would recommend it to a congressman or senator to pick it up. That is a base closing bill for federal crimes. Remember the closing bill you have commission of military guys and get together and determine what bases the pentagon doesnt need. That lets everybody off the hook for base closing in their state because pentagon didnt want it. Lets do the same thing for federal laws. We have 2,000 to 4,000 federal laws, if we have several thousand federal laws lets allow judges to get together and look at which ones are redundant and yesterdays news. Federal law carjacking, all 57 states already make carjacking a crime. Somebody wanted to headline so they had a federal law and now a federal crime and not just illegal in all states. There are real opportunities to peel that back. I think the base closing approach would allow us to do that for federal overcriminalization in the same way we are able to pull back bases that were not part of National Defense but were expensive. And civil Asset Forfeiture the president tomorrow could solve the problem by telling them the feds wont goat involved when new mexico in our packet, a list of who has done good stuff and who hasnt. One best state is new mexico. You have to be convicted before they can steal your stuff. And when they steal your stuff it goes into the state budget, not to the sheriff which is a bad incentive when the money goes to the guy who took your stuff. Better to have it go to general budget because then they take it if it is really a bad idea and doesnt enrich them. In new mexico the local cops can go and bring the feds in on the bust and th