Obama pushes for reduced prison sentences The move is a response in part to a year of racial turmoil sparked by police violence in New York, Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri.

PHILADELPHIA — After a year of racial turmoil across America, including riots against police violence in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, President Barack Obama urged Congress to reform mandatory sentencing guidelines that have disproportionately put African-Americans in jail on extended terms for nonviolent crimes.

At a gathering of black leaders at the 106 th Annual NAACP Convention on Tuesday, Obama made his pitch for taking steps to remedy a “long history of inequity in the criminal justice system in America.” And while his speech focused specifically on reforms to juvenile justice, sentencing and incarceration, Obama also considered how flaws in the courts reflect broader societal ills, bemoaning the “pipeline from underfunded, inadequate schools to overcrowded jails.”


The policy address is bookended by the president’s announcement Monday of 46 commutations of sentences for nonviolent drug offenders and by his planned visit to a federal prison in El Reno, Oklahoma, on Thursday.

In recent months, a coalition from across the political spectrum has emerged in favor of moving away from “tough on crime” rules that have bloated prisons with minor offenders over the last few decades, and that made it difficult for them to get a job and return to society upon release.

For Obama, the moment also offers him a chance to get beyond “more talk” about race — as he called for in his eulogy for a pastor slain with eight others at a black church in Charleston — and to prevent America from slipping “into a comfortable silence again.”

Obama told the 3,300 people packed into an auditorium at the Philadelphia Convention Center, “I see those young men on street corners, eventually prisons, and I think they look – they could be me.” The only difference, Obama said, is that he grew up in a more forgiving environment.

“I had a second chance,” he said, echoing a theme from his commutation announcement, “and they have no margin for error.”

Although the president’s soaring, singing eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney was a clear precursor to Tuesday’s speech, Obama maintained a tone more politician than preacher. He promised not to sing at the outset, and ignored frequent attempts by the audience to engage in a call-and-response. But the idea of grace so central to the Charleston speech was subtly present in his appeal to offer offenders a second chance.

“In the American tradition and in the immigrant tradition of remaking ourselves, in the Christian tradition that says none of us is without sin and all of us need redemption, justice and redemption go hand in hand,” Obama said.

Ahead of his speech, Obama said he met with four former prisoners, each of whom had found their own redemption after incarceration. He said his trip Thursday to a federal prison — the first by a sitting president — would “shine a spotlight” on how inmate treatment helps or stymies their reintegration with society. He called for a cultural shift on how Americans deal with prisons, in one of his biggest applause lines of the approximately 45-minute speech.

“We should not tolerate conditions in prison that have no place in any civilized country. 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. “That’s no joke. These things are unacceptable.”

He also noted the tradeoffs involved in spending so heavily on prisons – the U.S. spends about $80 billion annually on jails — at the expense of other measures more effective at deterring crime, and urged Congress to pass a bipartisan sentencing reform proposal.

A bipartisan consensus in favor of sentencing reform has developed in recent months with support from groups as different as some members of the Coalition for Public Safety, which includes the Tea Party group FreedomWorks and Koch Industries, and the left-leaning Center for American Progress and ACLU. A series of hearings in the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on criminal justice issues will feature testimony from Heritage Foundation scholars advocating similar remedies as Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

They all express similar frustration at the ballooning statistics: the 2.3 million people currently imprisoned is a five-fold increase over 30 years ago, and an estimated one-third of all Americans have a criminal record. Even short stays in prison have been tied to substantial lost earnings over a lifetime.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) addressed the burden on the federal government specifically in his opening statement at Tuesday’s hearing: federal prisons are 40 percent over capacity, a system that takes up a quarter of the Justice Department’s budget, expected to grow to a third by 2020.

Mark Holden, Koch Industries General Counsel, sounded downright liberal in an interview when he described why conservative industrialists Charles and David Koch back changing the current system, which “more often than not negatively impacts poor people” and serves as a “poverty trap.”

Holden and Jenny Kim, Koch’s Deputy Counsel, participated in a mid-April White House meeting with Chief Counsel Neil Eggleston, Domestic Policy Counsel Director Cecelia Munoz, senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and Roy Austin, Obama’s top policy adviser on criminal justice issues, where they discussed “Ban the Box” — a policy already in place at Koch Industries.

The “Ban the Box” movement wants employers to remove questions about prior criminal convictions from the initial stage of job applications; in many cases, checking that box virtually eliminates ex-cons from applicant pools before they even get a chance to make their case.

White House officials have told advocates they’re considering an executive order to make federal contractors “ban the box,” waiting until subsequent interviews and background checks to learn about criminal history.

The Heritage Foundation’s John Malcolm urged Obama not to alienate the political right by leaning too heavily on executive actions, but he noted other areas of potential agreement, including cutting back on mandatory minimum sentences, taking steps to reduce prison overcrowding and improving rehabilitation programs.

Most American prisoners are in state-run facilities, and the president’s path has been cleared of political barbs by Republican and Democratic governors – especially in the South – who have already made some of these reforms.

“They have touched the third rail of risking being labeled soft on crime and have lived to tell the tale,” Malcolm said.

But the politics are still challenging: conservatives and liberals are promoting the same solutions, they don’t necessarily see themselves solving the same problems. At the very least, they don’t define them the same way.

For the right, excessive and inflexible government laws and regulations, combined with wasteful spending and ineffective prison management, are sending too many people to jail, degrading their dignity and releasing them without the skills to rejoin society. Easing punishments for people who didn’t necessarily realize they were committing a crime and so-called “back-end” prison reforms to reduce recidivism are key issues.

For the left, the criminal justice system is inextricably linked to historical injustices.

“We often talk about mass incarceration, but it’s not really mass incarceration for everyone,” said the Center for American Progress’s Michele Jawando. Blacks are jailed at 4 times the rate of whites, and racial minorities make up about 60 percent of the prison population.

“We’re still unpacking 20 years of… ’tough on crime’ and Willie Horton,” Jawando said, but she sees deeper origins in today’s problems, in the “residual effects of the dismantling of slavery and the Jim Crow south.”