Fresh off his victory in securing a final deal with Iran on its nuclear program, President Obama wasted no time diving into the next item on his agenda: overhauling the criminal justice system.
After first signaling during a press conference with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff that the issue was on his mind, Obama outlined what reforms he wants in a speech at the NAACP’s annual conference last week. Then, later in the week, he became the first commander-in-chief to visit a prison, touring a federal facility outside of Oklahoma City where he explored the topic even further.
For a change, it looks as if Obama’s chosen priorities aligns with those of Congress. He invited 16 members to a White House meeting in February to discuss the issue, and since then, bipartisan legislation revamping several sectors of the criminal justice system has been introduced in both chambers. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held two days of hearings last week to listen to testimony from lawmakers, governors and experts.
Although people and groups as diverse as the Koch brothers and the ACLU are on board with some of the ideas that have come up, Congress is unlikely to go as far as Obama urged. For example, he suggests allowing ex-cons to vote and “banning the box” — which means forbidding employers from asking job applicants about their criminal records.
“Let’s follow the growing number of our states and cities and private companies who have decided to ‘ban the box’ … so that former prisoners who have done their time and are now trying to get straight with society have a decent shot in a job interview,” Obama said during the NAACP speech in Philadelphia. “And if folks have served their time, and they’ve re-entered society, they should be able to vote.”
“Banning the box” will be a tougher sell on Capitol Hill, as neither of the two main reform packages include it. Neither includes restoring the franchise either, but a spokeswoman for Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., co-author of the SAFE Justice Act, said the one-time Judiciary Committee chairman is “open to considering it.”
Obama’s decision last week to commute the sentences of 46 nonviolent federal drug offenders was not universally well-received on Capitol Hill, and could make it harder for him to get what he wants.
“Rather than taking a serious look at criminal justice reform … Obama chose to engage in publicity stunts and political pandering,” Sensenbrenner said after the clemency announcement. “Commuting the sentences of a few drug offenders is a move designed to spur headlines, not meaningful reform.”
The administration favors the Smarter Sentencing Act authored by Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., but recently the White House said Obama is open to discussing the SAFE Justice Act and other legislation.
“[W]e’re certainly open to additional conversations with other members of Congress,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said last week. “The president is not just open to those discussions; he’s actually looking forward to them.”
Obama said he wants to focus on the “community, the courtroom and the cellblock.”
He said America needs to invest more in education, particularly early education, and in at-risk youth job programs. He also said police departments across the country need to listen to his task force and institute better officer training and data collection to make policing “more effective … more accountable … [and] more unbiased.”
Mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug offenders need to be severely reduced or eliminated, Obama said. Giving judges more discretion could help “steer a young person who has made a mistake in a better direction.”
He called on Congress to pass sentencing reform and include alternatives to prison, such as drug courts and probation.
His visit Thursday to El Reno Federal Correctional Institute was intended to shine light on inhumane prison conditions and highlight a facility that practices some of what Obama is preaching.
Inmates “are also Americans, and we have to make sure that as they do their time and pay back their debt to society that we are increasing the possibility that they can turn their lives around,” he said.
“And that’s why we should not tolerate conditions in prison that have no place in any civilized country,” he added. “We should not be tolerating overcrowding in prison; we should not be tolerating gang activity in prison; we should not be tolerating rape in prison.”
“And we shouldn’t be making jokes about it in our popular culture,” he said of prison rape. “That’s no joke.”
Both the White House and last week’s House hearings have focused on the staggering prison statistics: 2.2 million inmates nationally, which is four times as many in 1980 and 25 percent of the world’s prison population. Sixty percent of them are black or Latino, there are 54,000 imprisoned minors and it costs $80 billion each year to house the entire prison population.
“Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or even years at a time?” Obama asked in Philadelphia. “That is not going to make us safer … our prisons should be a place where we can train people for skills that can help them find a job, not train them to become more hardened criminals.”
