National Association of Manufacturers ALEXANDER B. TROWBRIDGE September 10, 1980 The Honorable Strom Thurmond 209 Russell Senate Office Bldg. Dear Senator Thurmond: The NAM has followed the evolution of criminal code reform legislation for several years, but has taken no position on the merits of such legislation because of its breadth and the relatively few sections that directly affect business. During the past two years, several sections of the proposed legislation, particularly the reckless endangerment provision, have become the subjects of intensive debate and concern within the business community. Accordingly, as the proposed legislation moved forward and the intensity of debate heightened, the NAM became actively involved in negotiations regarding provisions of concern to business. We are gratified that you feel that these negotiations between NAM staff and your staff have "made an important contribution to this bill." Our premise throughout these negotiations has been that the best approach to codification is to collate and simplify current law rather than to make new law. Based on that premise, we have sought changes in S. 1722, the Criminal Code Reform, to reflect the consensus of current law. For that reason, the NAM will not support a bill containing an "endangerment" provision. Your August 28, 1980, letter expressed the "hope that it might be possible for the NAM to extend its endorsement to this measure." NAM has focused its attention only on those provisions of S. 1722 directly affecting business and, therefore, can neither comment on nor endorse the measure in its entirety. We can both endorse and support the provisions described in your letter which substantially satisfy our concerns regarding S. 1722 as reported by the Senate Judiciary Committee. 1776 F Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20006 (202) 626-3800 85-862 0-81-26 The Honorable Strom Thurmond Page Two Subject to the foregoing limitations and since we have been assured that current and prospective changes within S. 1722, described in your letter, will be embodied in the bill that becomes law, the NAM will endorse enactment of S. 1722 and support its enactment at each step in the legislative process. We look forward to continued mutual efforts on S. 1722 as well as on other legislative matters. Sincerely, cc: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy Sen. Orrin G. Hatch Alexander B. Trowbridge Statement Prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee by Brian Forst, Vice President for Research, INS LAW, Inc. Charles Wellford, Director, Institute of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of Maryland ober 26, 1981 Mr. Chairman, it is a pleasure to present to you in this statement a summary of research recently completed on federal sentencing. This research, which was begun in June 1979, was funded and directed by the Federal Justice Research Program, Department of Justice. Mr. Brian Forst was the project director and Dr. Charles Wellford was the project monitor. A more extensive summary of the research is contained in the attached article written by us and recently published in the Rutgers Law Review. Full documentation of the project is to be found in four final reports which have previously been submitted to the Committee. The project has four major components: 1) a statistical study of a large number of sentences recently given in federal courts; 2) a survey of federal judges, U.S. Attorneys, and probation officers concerning their perceptions of current sentencing practices and the goals of sentencing and sentencing reform; 3) a survey of a large sample of the general public; and 4) a survey of recently incarcerated federal offenders. In the following we will highlight the major findings from these components of the project and then offer a general conclusion we think the project as a whole supports. Major Findings While the majority of the criminal cases filed in U.S. District courts appear superficially to resemble offenses that are common in state and local courts--including robberies, burglaries, homicides, assaults, larcenies, auto thefts, sex offenses, drugs, weapons, and escapes--federal cases are for the most part quite different. They more often involve crimes of stealth: embezzlement, fraud, forgery, bribery, and so on. They tend to be much more lucrative. We found also that federal offenders tend to be older and quite criminally active. We estimated the level of criminal activity of federal offenders using two fundamentally different techniques. The first consisted of estimating the number of offenses per year for each major offense and age category as follows: multiply the number of arrests per year by the inverse of the arrest rate (the arrest rate is the estimated ratio of arrests to offenses) for that category. The second technique was more straightforward: we asked incarcerated offenders in eight different federal prisons to estimate how many crimes they committed. Despite the methodological problems associated with each technique, we obtained surprisingly similar results from the two different methods of estimating rate of criminal activity. Using FBI data on arrests, we estimate that the typical federal offender commits 10 offenses per year free; using "self-report" data obtained in our survey of federal prison inmates, we estimate that the more serious federal offender commits 14 offenses per year free. While the similarity of these two numbers may be largely coincidental, they do appear to lend some support to the potential efficacy of a strategy of incapacitation for certain classes of federal offenders. To learn about the sentences received by specific classes of federal offenders and thus provide an initial basis for guidelines development, we collected and extracted data from 5,781 recent (1974 through 1978) federal pre-sentence investigation (PSI) reports. These reports document in detail the nature and extent of the crimes and characteristics of the offenders for Several hundred PSI reports were drawn a sample of 11 offense categories. from 8 federal districts (as many as 120 per district) for each of 8 offense categories, and over 500 reports were drawn nationwide for each of three |