By Marc Schindler
Executive Director of JPI
Originally Posted on Huffington Post's Crime Blog
During a powerful speech to the NAACP
convention on Tuesday, President Obama outlined sweeping reforms
to ensure our justice system is more fair and
effective. He will be the first President to
visit a federal prison, and he commuted more sentences in a single
day since Lyndon B. Johnson.
These efforts will surely illuminate some of the most
glaring problems with our nation’s justice system, such as the
excessive incarceration of people convicted of nonviolent drug
offenses and deplorable practices of solitary
confinement. Solving the nation’s crisis of incarceration will
require sustained attention and committed action. And while removing or
reducing time served by people convicted of nonviolent drug
offenses would be significant, ending the era of our
incarceration generation requires deeper changes where incarceration is used as
the last resort. This would be a dramatic shift from current practices where
incarceration is too often used as the first response to social problems.
Obama’s speech rang like music to the ears of
community activists, advocates and experts who have long
called for reforms like
eliminating mandatory sentences, ending the use
of solitary confinement, and investing in hard-hit
neighborhoods. As the President noted, there is nothing new about
recognizing the failures of the criminal justice system. What has changed is a growing political and
popular consensus that business as usual isn’t working for
anyone.
When I learned of Obama’s scheduled visit to the
El Reno federal prison in Oklahoma on Thursday, my first thought
was gratitude for an encounter that is long overdue. My
second thought was disbelief. Was it possible that a sitting President of
the United States, which spends $80 billion each year to house the
world’s largest incarcerated population, has never
before investigated the impacts firsthand? Imagine a nation
where health care or education policy is designed and implemented on state and
federal levels without the Commander in Chief ever stepping into a
hospital or school.
It’s well known that the justice system
disproportionately impacts young men of color, and treats people of color
differently for the same crimes. Essentially, there is glaring unfairness in
our so-called justice system. The President also spoke to
the enormity of the system in terms of its costs and impact on
children and families.
Consider the magnitude. Expanding on an estimate
from a Bureau of Justice report, roughly 2.5 million children have
incarcerated parents. Using the same math and
considering that about 70 million people
have criminal records that means approximately 78 million
children have parents with a record. In the end the total number
is staggering: out of a national population of 318.9 million
people, 153 million are either in
prison or jail, have a criminal record, or have
parents who are in prison or jail, or have a conviction.
And this is the first time a sitting President
has visited a U.S. prison?
I have every hope that the President will be deeply
impacted by what he experiences in El Reno. In my own
work, visits to prisons and encounters with people in
prison have been some of the most powerful ways to motivate reform.
Following the President’s lead, every governor, mayor and county executive
should be called on to visit an adult or juvenile facility within the next 60
days.
I know that the commutations the President ordered this
week will mean everything to the people who have been given
a second chance. And diverting individuals or reducing sentences
for people convicted of nonviolent offenses would make a significant
dent in the imprisoned population. But sentencing reform should
be considered more broadly and account for actual public safety benefits.
Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project has advanced the
idea of sentencing maximums, which cap sentences at 20 years except for
the most extreme instances. Decades long sentences increase costs without
advancing safety. To implement comprehensive reforms we need to address
excessively long sentencing system-wide, not just for non-violent drug
offenders.
The President says that we are a people that believe in second
chances. I agree with that, but we also must scrutinize our first
responses. Now is the time where we must work together to ask
and answer the hard questions: In what instances is prison the correct
response? For whom is it the right option? And what is it intended to do?
To truly transform our justice system, we need to not only open
our eyes to its failures but also question its intent. We all need to work
together to make sure that this shift is not just in the way we talk about
prisons, but ultimately in how they are used—as a last resort, in
limited circumstances, and always measured by their fairness and effectiveness.
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