This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 28th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Criminal justice reform, in particular mandatory minimum sentences are overdue for reform.

Congressman Jim Sensibrenner and Congressman Bobby Scott hope to reduce mandatory minimums and save taxpayers billions each year in the process.

We spoke yesterday.

Congressman Sensenbrenner, you, uh, I have to ask you to tell this story again because

it's it's so useful to have this out in the open

no matter how many times I hear it, which is a particular interaction that you had with the

Congressional Research Service a few years ago?

Well, one of the things the over-criminalization task force, which I was the chair and

Mr Scott was the ranking member of, or looking at, was various types of federal crimes.

And we asked the Congressional Research Service to give us a list of administrative regulations

that have criminal penalties on it.

And we got a response back from the CRS that essentially said, we don't have the staff to be able

to do this because there's so many of them.

So we are going to task all of the agencies that promulgate administrative regs with criminal

penalties to give us a list of them so at least we can see which ones

need to be reviewed and hopefully repealed. I mean that very idea that an

administrative regulation something that Congress doesn't control directly

could have criminal penalties attached to it seems particularly troubling.

Well, particularly when you look at the nature of those kinds of crimes,

violation of the regulation can be a criminal offense.

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