By Tom Cotton
Thursday, November 18, 2021
Over the past two years, violent crime and drug
overdoses have claimed over 200,000 American lives. This dark reality must
not become the new normal. We must instead face this crisis head on and
reinvest in the three fundamentals of law enforcement: police, prosecutors, and
prisons. We will break this crime wave by stopping those responsible for
creating it while deterring others from adding to the chaos.
We should begin by making a once-in-a-generation
investment in police salaries, training, and equipment, with a goal of putting
100,000 new officers on the street. In the 1990s, even Joe Biden voted for this
solution to break that decade’s crime wave. For once, he was right. Those
officers brought greater safety, security, and prosperity to countless
communities nationwide. This solution worked then, and it will work now.
I recently introduced the “Fund the Police Act,” which
would reprogram $50 billion in unspent coronavirus-relief money to support
state and local police departments. This money would immediately provide $2
billion to law-enforcement grant programs and create a Law Enforcement Support
Trust Fund that would award an additional $1 billion in grants each year for
half a century. In its first year, this grant program could cover the annual
salaries of nearly 30,000 police officers and detectives, and the trust fund
could provide for 15,000 police officers and detectives
every year after that. These funds can also be used to modernize departments
with state-of-the-art equipment, fleets of new vehicles, and the best training
available. State and local governments must also increase their law-enforcement
budgets, but the Fund the Police Act would make a necessary down payment on
community security.
Once we surge police onto the streets, we have to enforce
the laws on the books, including so-called “petty” or “quality-of-life” crimes.
That means fighting vagrancy and vandalism in addition to violent crime.
Disrespect for the law doesn’t start with murder, and it must be stopped before
it costs lives. Quality-of-life crimes degrade community environments and
contribute to an atmosphere of criminality and a cycle of devolving standards,
which harms the most vulnerable more than any other group. These crimes make up
the majority of complaints from community members to officers, and they should
be taken seriously.
Next, we must ensure that criminals who are put in squad
cars are then put behind bars. This means surging federal prosecutors to
especially dangerous cities and encouraging voters to recall, remove, and
replace Soros-backed, so-called “progressive prosecutors” wherever
they are found. Real prosecutors should pay special attention to federal gun
criminals, gang members, and the peddlers of deadly narcotics and illicit
opioids.
For its part, Congress ought to permanently classify
fentanyl and fentanyl analogues as Schedule I controlled substances.
Soft-on-crime opposition has forced the federal government to bounce from one
temporary extension to another, when there is no doubt that deadly fentanyl
analogues should be kept off the streets. Similarly, jailbreak activists want
to retroactively reduce crack- cocaine-trafficking sentences for thousands of
hardened criminals. They claim they want to reduce the “disparity” between
powder-cocaine and crack-cocaine sentences. If that is really their aim, then we
should increase powder-cocaine sentences to match crack sentences. These
changes will not harm the victims of the drug trade (addicted drug users) but
will instead punish only the traffickers who are responsible for tens of
thousands of deaths a year.
State, local, and federal prosecutors must also have zero
tolerance for rioting, looting, and political violence of any kind. Victims of
politically motivated rioting and looting are not only subjected to assault or
theft. They are also the casualties of an act of insurrection, an assault on
society. Such actions don’t simply inflict personal pain, but wreak widespread
societal damage and breakdown of trust within the body politic. These acts of
violence should therefore be swiftly, reliably, and firmly punished.
Once convicted, criminals ought to stay behind bars for
all or at least the vast majority of their prison sentences. Murderers
currently serve an average of less than 60 percent of their prison sentences,
and drug traffickers serve only 40 percent of their prescribed prison time.
This is not justice.
We must also invest in our nation’s prison system, so
that our jails and prisons have the resources to safely and securely hold
inmates while giving them opportunities to become law-abiding, productive
members of society. Prisons shouldn’t merely warehouse dangerous offenders for
a few years before releasing them. Instead, they should connect convicted
criminals with pre-release integration programing, work training, drug
rehabilitation, and mental-health resources to break the cycle of crime.
Prisons can be institutions of reform, rehabilitation,
and redemption, especially for lower-level offenders. Contrary to the beliefs
of our liberal friends, discipline and determination are more important than
compassion or charity in this endeavor, but the goal is the same: not only the
just punishment of the offender, but the cultivation and reclamation of the
citizen. Correctional facilities need far more resources for this goal to
become reality.
Defunding prisons, as some radicals propose, wouldn’t
just result in more criminals on the streets, but also more inmates emerging
worse than when they entered. Poorly funded prisons too often become dens of
crime and recruitment centers for gangs. Petty criminals can thereby be
introduced to violent criminal networks, putting them on the path to personal
and societal destruction. In 2015, the FBI’s National Gang Intelligence
Center found that gang membership was growing at 68 percent
of correctional institutions, while 44 percent of prison facilities also
reported that gang members were joining the ranks of domestic-extremist groups.
These are disturbing indicators that authorities do not have the necessary
resources to protect inmates and maintain order. Perhaps the attorney
general should be fighting against these real domestic extremists, instead of
fake ones he imagines at school-board meetings.
One tool in particular is essential to the survival of
extremist groups and gangs in prison: contraband cellphones. These devices are
smuggled into prisons, then used for a variety of nefarious activities, such as
coordinating the delivery of drugs inside prison walls, corrupting prison
officials by soliciting outside payments, and maintaining criminal networks
across and outside of prison facilities. Inmates also use these cellphones to
intimidate witnesses and inflict retribution against honest officers in their
prisons. Congress should pass my bill, the Cell Phone Jamming Reform Act, to
enable prisons to jam the signals of contraband cellphones within their walls.
We should also improve pay and benefits for our nation’s
correctional officers, who are outnumbered 3-to-1 by inmates and who perform
one of the most difficult jobs in law enforcement. In a nine-year period
measured by the National Institutes of Health, correctional officers suffered
over 125,000 work-related injuries, and 113 tragically lost their lives. These
men and women deserve a raise and improved benefits, making it easier to
attract the best officers and making them less susceptible to pressure from
rich and connected criminals. We should likewise expand the ranks of parole
officers and encourage increased specialization, which has reduced recidivism
rates.
Finally, the federal government should stop the flow of
drugs and gang members across the border, which act as accelerants of crime. The
president should declare a national emergency and surge resources, technology,
and personnel to lock down our southern border. We need to finish the border
wall, harden our ports of entry, and invest in the most advanced drug-detection
tools in the world. Some may balk at the cost of securing the border. But the
cost of an insecure border is far greater.
As we secure our border, our government must go beyond
simple defense. We must go on offense and fight the drug trade at its source.
The United States must lead our neighbors in Latin America — and insist on
greater cooperation from them — to obliterate the powerful drug cartels. The
Sinaloa Cartel alone has killed far more Americans than ISIS or al-Qaeda ever
has. Similarly, we must not ignore illicit Chinese super-labs, which send
massive quantities of fentanyl and its chemical precursors to Latin America for
production and shipment across our border and into the United States.
Our country cannot foster opportunity without order or
prosperity without protection for our people. A true anti-crime agenda will
reestablish the rule of law in a society that is veering toward the criminality
and violence of the 1990s. It is time to break the crime wave.
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