House Easily Approves $28-Billion Crime Bill : Congress: Measure would add more police, prisons. It is sent for reconciliation with Senate’s version.

In a major step toward final passage of anti-crime legislation, the House on Thursday overwhelmingly approved the most expensive and far-reaching crime bill ever considered by Congress.

The $28-billion measure, which has President Clinton’s blessing, is designed to put more police on the street, build more prisons, get tough on violent offenders, spend billions for crime-prevention programs and expand the federal death penalty to 66 new offenses, although it also would open the door to more appeals of death sentences.

Adopted on a 285-141 roll call, the measure will now be sent to a Senate-House conference committee, which must work out the differences between it and a crime bill approved in November by the Senate.

Rep. Jack Brooks (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and floor manager of the bill, called the House action a major victory.

“This is a breakthrough to achieve a balance between hard-nosed punishment and forward-looking prevention,” he said.

While the future of specific provisions is uncertain--and the funding is subject to additional appropriation votes--the House action virtually guarantees that sweeping crime legislation will be approved by Congress this year. In large part, the outcome has been driven by a public outcry over crime and the perception--accurate or not--that it is rampant in the streets of the United States.

Since last fall, Clinton has pledged to work for passage of a crime bill, and even though members of Congress differ sharply over crime-fighting philosophy, opponents of the bill--mostly Republicans--were loath to oppose it for fear of disappointing constituents in an election year.

Clinton and the Democrats are expected to reap large political benefits if the final bill is passed--especially if it fulfills Clinton’s pledge to put 100,000 more police officers on the streets and includes multibillion-dollar crime-prevention programs.

That the Democrats would lead the charge on anti-crime legislation heavy on punishment marks a sizable political turnabout. Some months ago, they began a serious effort to adopt for themselves an issue that has long been considered the province of the GOP.

“Politically, I think Democrats have recaptured the crime issue,” said Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a major architect of the bill. “For years, Republicans attacked Democrats as soft and mushy-headed on crime. That won’t work anymore.”

But Republican leaders complained that the bill is too soft on career criminals and undercuts the death penalty by allowing defendants in capital cases to allege racial bias in the imposition of death sentences.

Even so, 65 GOP lawmakers joined with 219 Democrats and one independent to adopt the measure; 107 Republicans and 34 Democrats voted against it, among them five members of Orange County’s delegation.

“This bill is no trophy for us to carry back to our police officers and our judges,” said Rep. Ron Packard (R-Oceanside). “Law enforcement officials and the American public support measures that will actually put and keep violent criminals behind bars. These measures are conspicuously absent from this bill.”

While opposing the measure as a whole, Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R--Garden Grove) succeeded in helping win an amendment he has long endorsed--the creation of a police corps that would provide college scholarships in return for a four-year commitment to serve with a police force. Dornan proposed the police corps concept in 1989 and has fought for such legislation in every Congress since.

The bill would provide $100 million the first year to educate and train 20,000 recruits. Similar to the military’s Reserve Officer Training Corps, candidates would attend four years of college, then serve for four years as fully empowered police officers.

“The Police Corps will successfully attack crime and increase public security by substantially augmenting the number of college-educated police officers on patrol across the country,” Dornan said.

But even that victory was not sweet enough for Dornan to support what he called do-nothing legislation.

“The police corps is preventive maintenance way down the stream,” Dornan said after the vote. “We are trying to give the American people relief from violent street crime and carjackings . . . and this bill doesn’t do it.”

Also voting against the bill were Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), Rep. Jay C. Kim (R--Diamond Bar) and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach.)

Only Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) supported it.

“The House bill is flawed, but Republicans have won important amendments to step up the fight on crime. I voted for the House bill to keep the process alive,” Royce said, vowing to safeguard certain provisions of the measure as it moves on to a House-Senate conference committee.

The President, who stayed out of the Senate’s crime-bill debate, intervened in the House, endorsing a popular provision--known as “three strikes and you’re out”--that would require life imprisonment without parole for repeat offenders who commit violent crimes.

Congressional leaders said the President would now take the offensive on behalf of an assault-weapons ban, which was approved by the Senate but excluded from the House measure.

Speaker Thomas S. Foley has promised that the House will consider the issue in a separate bill to be brought to the floor within the next few weeks.

GOP leaders also were expected to oppose that measure, which would prohibit the possession, sale or future manufacture of assault weapons.

The Senate-House conference, scheduled to start early in May, is expected to be hard-fought but not particularly prolonged. Key lawmakers said they hoped to get a bill on the President’s desk by the end of next month, before members of Congress leave on a Memorial Day recess.

The committee was expected to go along with the Senate provision that would provide for 100,000 more police officers at a cost of $9 billion. The House version called for only 50,000 officers at a cost of $5.3 billion.

Major differences were anticipated, however, on whether to retain the Senate-passed assault-weapons ban and on how to allocate the remainder of the funds.

The House, for example, authorized a total of $13.5 billion for states to build and operate prisons, more than double the $6.5 billion voted by the Senate for prisons and alternatives such as “boot camps” for youthful offenders.

In another major difference, the House bill includes an unprecedented $8 billion for a variety of crime-prevention programs, including $2 billion in grants to local governments in high-crime areas and $525 million for job training.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), who will be one of the House conferees in the negotiating session with the Senate, said: “There must be a better balance than exists in the Senate crime bill between federal spending for incarceration and federal spending for prevention of crime.”

Conyers also criticized some of the get-tough provisions in the measure, saying: “Bumper-sticker slogans like ‘Three strikes, you’re out’ make great copy but will only overload an already overburdened criminal-justice system and further reduce a judge’s discretion.”

There will also be pressure to allocate funds for prison construction because of the repeated emphasis during the weeklong House debate on the need to keep violent criminals behind bars.

Marc Klaas, father of slain 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma, for example, urged Congress to authorize the $13.5 billion included in the House bill for the construction and operation of prisons. This provision would earmark 25% of the money to states that increase the prison time served by repeated violent offenders.

“Every day one of these guys is away is a day he can’t commit a crime against an innocent citizen,” Klaas said at a press conference. “This is the one law that could have made a difference in my daughter’s case.”

It appeared likely, however, that the allocation for prisons would be closer to the lower Senate figure because of other demands on the available funds.

Schumer, chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on crime, described the House bill as a “centrist” measure that responds to the public’s demand to stop political squabbling and pass an effective crime bill.

“We tried to do things that work and not things that ring our bells or press our ideological buttons,” he told reporters. “This is one of the few times that Washington listened to what’s going on in the streets.”

Only 34 Democrats--mostly liberals, but some conservatives--voted against the bill. Twenty-four of the 38 members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for passage despite the traditional opposition of its members to expansion of the death penalty. That concern was counterbalanced by the provision allowing death-penalty appeals to be based on statistical evidence of racial bias in such sentences.

The 65 Republicans who broke with their leadership included moderate GOP lawmakers. In California, for example, eight of the 22-member Republican delegation voted for the bill, along with 27 of the 30 Democrats from the state.

The outcome indicated that a final version of the bill emerging from the conference committee would be approved easily in both chambers. The Senate legislation passed by a 95-4 vote.

The House also voted, 402 to 22, to remove weight-training equipment from federal prisons on grounds that it would prevent prisoners from increasing their fighting abilities.

The House also voted to bar prisoners from receiving Pell grants for college education by a vote of 312 to 116. Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) contended that the $36 million spent on 28,000 prisoners would be better spent on students not behind bars.

On a related issue, the House decided, 347 to 82, to require federal prisoners who have not graduated from high school to earn a general equivalency diploma before becoming eligible for early release. Exceptions could be made, however, by the director of the Bureau of Prisons.

Times staff writer Faye Fiore contributed to this report.

Vote on Crime Bill

Here is how members of the California delegation voted Thursday as the House passed a $28-billion crime bill:

Democrats for--Becerra, Beilenson, Berman, Brown, Condit, Dixon, Dooley, Edwards, Eshoo, Farr, Fazio, Filner, Hamburg, Harman, Lantos, Lehman, Martinez, Matsui, Miller, Mineta, Pelosi, Roybal-Allard, Schenk, Stark, Torres, Tucker, Woolsey.

Republicans for--Calvert, Cunningham, Gallegly, Horn, Huffington, Hunter, McCandless, Royce.

Democrats against--Dellums, Waters, Waxman.

Republicans against--Baker, Cox, Doolittle, Dornan, Dreier, Herger, Kim, McKeon, Moorhead, Packard, Pombo, Rohrabacher, Thomas.

Republicans not voting--Lewis.