Tillis Fights for Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Press Release:

    WASHINGTON, D.C.     During his first two years in the U.S. Senate, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) has been a leading advocate for bipartisan criminal justice reform, a continuation of his successful efforts to implement reforms at the state level during his tenure as North Carolina House Speaker.

    During the Washington Post's Juvenile Justice Summit earlier this month, Senator Tillis has made it clear that pursuing criminal justice reforms would be one of his top priorities in the upcoming 115th Congress, stating: "This is a critically important issue and solvable problem. We need people to step up and understand the political courage to say it is time to solve this problem."

    Watch Senator Tillis explain why we need laws that are tough on crime and smart on rehabilitation:

    Tillis is a co-sponsor and outspoken supporter of the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act.

    "This is not a bill about letting murderers go or making our society less safe. It's a bill that could potentially get someone released sooner so that they would be less likely to commit a crime, save money in the judicial system, and make that transformational opportunity happen for a number of people...It is time to tell the far-left and the far-right to get productive or get out of the way, because we need to solve this problem." - Senator Thom Tillis, 12/1/16

    The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act recalibrates prison sentences for certain non-violent drug offenders while also targeting violent criminals and adding two new mandatory minimum sentences. The legislation also seeks to reduce recidivism through education, job training, drug rehabilitation, and faith-based programs, and creates a process to seal and expunge juvenile records for nonviolent offenses. Senator Tillis secured an additional layer of accountability in the bill that requires the Department of Justice to conduct a particularized inquiry of the facts and circumstances of each defendant considered for a reduced sentence.

    Senator Tillis has repeatedly called out both the far-right and far-left for attempting to block the landmark bipartisan bill, recently telling an audience at the Washington Post's Juvenile Justice Summit: "People bring up Willie Horton or some other political bombshell in the past, but what they're not being intellectually honest about is if we do not work on early release, if we do not rehabilitate 95 percent of the people who go into the prison system and come out, far more innocent people are going to be harmed. I'm not going to play that political game. The stakes are too high."

• Contact: Daniel Keylin
•     daniel_keylin@tillis.senate.gov