Obama became the first sitting President to visit a federal prison
While the historic Iran deal reached early last week has been a dominant topic in the news, Obama made history again on Thursday when he became the first sitting President to visit a federal prison: Federal Correctional Institution, El Reno in Oklahoma.
We’ve all heard the statistic that while the United States makes up only 5% of the world’s population, it holds 25% of the world’s prison population. According to the most recent numbers provided by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are 2.2 million people serving time in prison and jail.
“I think we have a tendency sometimes to almost take for granted or think it’s normal that so many young people end up in our criminal justice system. It’s not normal. It’s not what happens in other countries. What is normal is teenagers doing stupid things,” Obama said after touring the facility.
“In too many places, black boys and black men, and Latino boys and Latino men, experience being treated different under the law,” Obama told the group. “Mass incarceration makes our country worse off and we need to do something about it.”
President Obama’s decision to focus on sentencing reform and mass incarceration last week presents an opportunity for all of us working to change federal laws. Here at FCNL, ending mass incarceration is a priority for our work with this Congress.
We see the president’s actions last week as part of a new push for criminal justice reform coming out of the White House. The week started with President Barack Obama granting a record number of clemencies to non-violent drug offenders, marking what seems to be a revitalized push for criminal justice reform coming from the White House.
Speaking to the NAACP on Tuesday, the President outlined a vision for change in the criminal justice system that highlighted softer sentencing for soft crimes, job training for the incarcerated, and “banning the box” on job applications so that everyone has a fair chance at a job interview. The President also called for reinvesting funds for corrections into early childhood education to keep “folks from getting in the criminal justice system in the first place.”
And what better time to address the issue of mass incarceration than the present?
While Congress remains divided on a host of issues, there is growing interest in criminal justice reform on both sides of the aisle. Prominent Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have both expressed interest in common sense reforms and signed on as co-sponsors to Senators Mike Lee and Dick Durbin’s Smarter Sentencing Act.
This interest in reform doesn’t end in Congress. Days before Obama made his visit to Oklahoma, former President Bill Clinton expressed remorse for the harsher sentencing bill he signed into law, and in doing so, seemingly came to support his wife and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s plea for an end to the “incarceration generation.”
We here at the Friends Committee on National Legislation see the culmination of this week’s events as an opportunity to act. We’ve been reaching out to Friends across the country to gauge their involvement in this issue and encourage them to contact their legislatures in support of criminal justice reform for some time now, and now something bigger is brewing. This is the perfect occasion to use FCNL’s grassroots toolkit, contact your elected officials, write letters to the editor, and generally act on an issue of national importance.
