One of a U.S. president’s most important jobs is setting the nation’s agenda. This month, in becoming the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, President Obama finally made America’s failed criminal justice policies a priority.
Did the President learn much during his contrived and carefully controlled visit to a medium-security prison in Oklahoma? Probably not. But it was an important symbolic gesture that elevated the importance of changing a costly, inhumane, and ineffective system.
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In truth, the President is late to the game. Many activists and politicians have called for fundamental criminal justice reforms for more than a decade.
Jim Webb, a Democratic presidential candidate and former U.S. senator from Virginia, asked years ago for an overhaul of the nation’s prison and criminal justice system. Practically no one in Washington listened, including the President.
But better late than never. This month, the President commuted the federal sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders, most of whom were convicted under Draconian, discriminatory, and outdated sentencing laws. Thousands more across the country could also safely return to their communities.
Mr. Obama also called for sentencing alternatives for nonviolent offenders, and an end to a system that has incarcerated a disproportionate share of black and Latino men for low-level offenses.
Politically, the time for sweeping changes is right. An unprecedented bipartisan consensus is emerging to change what this country has done over the past four decades.
Conservative Republicans such as Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky are working with liberal Democrats such as Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont to reform mandatory minimum sentencing schemes. Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman finds common ground with Democrats on prisoner re-entry initiatives to curb recidivism.
Even House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, has joined a rising chorus in conceding that the nation has many people in prison who don’t belong there.
The statistics are grim: 1 million fathers behind bars; one in nine black children with a parent in prison; a U.S. prison population that grew from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million today — nearly half of them people of color — at an estimated annual cost of $80 billion.
Ohio’s state prison population rose from fewer than 8,000 in 1974 to more than 50,000 last year. Michigan spends more on prisons — $2 billion a year — than it does on higher education.
With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States holds 25 percent of the planet’s prisoners. Lowering the nation’s prison population to a rational, cost-effective level will take time.
Most of the increase in the U.S. penal population took place during the 1980s and 1990s. States adopted mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, three-strikes laws, and other costly and ineffective get-tough measures.
Those policies must be reversed. Congress can take another step forward by approving a bipartisan bill before the Senate that would allow less-lengthy prison terms for nonviolent drug offenders.
Mass incarceration remains arguably the country’s biggest economic, social, and moral problem. By visiting a prison and putting further reforms at the top of the nation’s agenda, President Obama has sped the drive to a more sane, humane, rational, and cost-effective system.
First Published July 26, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
