Mandatory minimum sentences and racial disparities inherent in criminal justice system are other likely topics of president’s speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday

Speaking before the NAACP national convention in the city where in 2008 he delivered an extraordinary campaign speech confronting a US legacy of racial injustice, Barack Obama is expected to outline his reforms for a criminal justice system that disproportionately affects black Americans.

The address in Philadelphia is part of a week-long criminal justice focus by Obama, who on Monday used his constitutional pardon power to commute the sentences of 46 people convicted of mostly nonviolent drug offenses, and on Thursday will become the first sitting president to visit a federal prison.

While the specifics of Obama’s speech remain unknown, they are expected to “lay out his ideas to make our country fairer, smarter and more cost effective while keeping the American people safe and secure”, the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters.

With Monday’s action to shorten the sentences of drug offenders, Obama demonstrated that he can exercise some of that power himself. But only Congress can make comprehensive changes that would better balance the courts, and reform advocates note that thousands of low-level offenders remain in a system designed to keep them there.

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Obama’s efforts to reduce sentences for nonviolent offenders are also restricted by sheer logistics. During his six years in office, a handful of Justice Department attorneys have received at least 19,000 applications for review at the office of the pardon attorney. The administration has in part blamed its scant use of commutations, compared with other presidents, on this mass of paperwork and the criteria for applications.

Unusually, Obama may have a chance to work with Republicans and Democrats in Congress on substantial justice reform. Fiscal conservatives and libertarians have found common cause with many Democrats who decry the unbalanced treatment of black and Hispanic Americans, as well as broader mass incarceration and the war on drugs.

Obama will almost certainly mention mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, which activists say is a primary cause of the mass imprisonment of more than 2.26 million people, the largest incarcerated population in the world, according to the National Research Council.

“You cannot talk about sentencing reform without addressing mandatory minimums,” said Michael Collins, policy director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an advocacy group. “It’s the main driver of mass incarceration in this country.”

But Collins noted that Congress must “take the lead” in changing laws about mandatory minimum sentences.

Minimum sentences increased significantly during the 1980s and largely tied judges’ hands with regard to drug convictions. The crackdown carried racial overtones: sentences for crack cocaine, more often associated with black dealers and users, were 100 times as heavy as those for powder cocaine crimes, more often affiliated with whites.

In 2010 Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act to reduce the discrepancy between crack cocaine and powder cocaine sentences in future cases. Stalwartly conservative senators, such as Utah’s Mike Lee and Texas’s Ted Cruz, have now joined with Democrats like Illinois’s Mike Durbin to support the Smarter Sentencing Act, a bill that would halve many mandatory minimums and give judges greater discretion to be lenient on a case-by-case basis.

Obama suggested a similar ethos in his commutations on Monday, saying that for the 46 prisoners’ drug offenses, “the punishments didn’t fit the crimes”.

Incarceration for each prisoner costs about $30,000 a year, and more than 100,000 people are in federal prison for drug-related crimes, according to a May US Sentencing Commission report. Obama’s comments on Monday that he would make taxpayer dollars more efficient suggests he will frame reforms in terms amenable to Republicans, about long-term costs of incarceration.

Obama has backed the bill, and Collins said the administration has been “very clear and forthright that the pendulum has swung too far in the wrong direction. We incarcerate too many people.”

The bill has run into some opposition in committee, and represents only one possible path for criminal justice reform. Obama can also move to expand initiatives begun by his former attorney general, Eric Holder, to relax federal guidelines for prosecuting drug offenses.

In what Collins called the “strangest bedfellows” of the reform movement, Obama and Holder have found de facto allies in Charles and David Koch, the energy billionaire brothers most famous for backing conservatives in major elections. The Kochs have backed a bill, sponsored by Wisconsin Republican Jim Sensenbrenner and Virginia Democrat Bobby Scott, that would emphasize revamped probation programs for minor drug offenses and nonviolent crimes.

Such programs include halfway homes, education and preparing prisoners for future employment. Lee has criticized the current system as “irrational and wasteful”.

“The Smarter Sentencing Act takes an important step forward in reducing the financial and human cost of outdated and imprudent sentencing policies,” Lee said in a statement earlier this year.

But even this reform would only affect the federal prison system, about 208,000 people, according to the Bureau of Prisons. The vast majority of the millions under supervision of the correctional system serve or have served time in state facilities.

Simultaneously, New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker and Kentucky Republican Rand Paul have sponsored a bill that would ban solitary confinement for most children, end the ban on food stamps for minor offenders, and help juveniles expunge convictions for nonviolent crimes.

Reform advocates said they hoped for executive orders from the president that would give weight to some of his remarks that “I believe at its heart America is a land of second chances.”

Beyond changing mandatory minimum sentences, “the other priority is making sure that people with criminal records have meaningful access to a second chance,” said Rebecca Vallas, a director of policy at the Center for American Progress (Cap).



“Between 70 to 100 million Americans have some kind of criminal record,” she said. “That’s one in three of us.”

But even for arrests without conviction, or for convictions of nonviolent misdemeanors and infractions, Vallas noted, meant “lifelong barriers to housing, employment, education, many of the necessary building blocks that people need to really rejoin their communities”.

Vallas said that Obama could lower these barriers by announcing measures that give job applicants with criminal records “a fair shot” at federal employment. He could also issue guidelines to the Housing Department, as he did to the Justice Department and federal prosecutors last year, that would change the way the federal government treats people convicted of nonviolent and minor crimes.

Most of the power remains with the states, but momentum has grown among national and local lawmakers hearing the united voices of liberal and conservative groups. Cap and the ACLU have formed an unlikely alliance with Koch Industries, Americans for Tax Reform and Tea Party-founded Freedom Works to form the Coalition for Public Safety, which said yesterday it supports Obama’s actions.

“There is still much more that needs to be done through bipartisan reforms on important issues like federal sentencing, prison reform, collateral consequences, re-entry, and over-criminalization,” said executive director Christine Leonard in a statement. “It’s clear that we need a major overhaul – starting with reserving beds for offenders who pose an actual risk to public safety.”