Speaking at NAACP convention in Philadelphia, president urges shorter sentences for some drug crimes and says felons should have right to vote

Barack Obama called for comprehensive reform of the US criminal justice system on Tuesday, including shorter sentences for certain drug offenses and the right to vote for convicted felons.

“Justice and redemption go hand in hand,” Obama said in a speech to the NAACP’s annual convention in downtown Philadelphia.

“I see those young men on street corners and eventually in prisons, and I think to myself: ‘They could be me,’” he said. “The main difference between me and them is I had a more forgiving environment so that when I slipped up, when I made a mistake, I had a second chance.”

Obama announced no new executive orders but tied together several of his administration’s campaigns from the last few years. He called for cities to embrace the recommendations of his task force on policing, cited the need for early education as a means to use opportunity to prevent crime, and highlighted the stark inequalities in incarceration, employment and education between white people and minorities.

He also voiced support for several proposals circulating in Congress, going so far as to commend Republican senators Rand Paul and John Cornyn for their support of reform. He also noted the “unlikely” bedfellows of the movement, which is supported by a cast that includes polar opposite senators Ted Cruz and Cory Booker and organizations as ideologically varied as the ACLU, Koch Industries and Americans for Tax Reform.

In particular, Obama called for shorter minimum mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, citing the sentences as the reason that the prison population has quadrupled from 500,000 in 1980 to more than 2.2 million today. In “far too many cases, the punishment simply does not fit the crime”, he said.

He also called for more discretion in the juvenile justice system, for better probation and training programs, and for employers to stop denying jobs to the tens of millions of Americans with a criminal record.

“Our nation’s being robbed of men and women who could be workers and taxpayers,” Obama said, making appeals to both fiscal sense and empathy. Citing the $80bn yearly cost of the prison system, he said: “For $80bn we could have universal preschool for every child in America.”

In perhaps the only announcement of the speech, Obama said a task force would investigate the overuse of solitary confinement.

The system “isn’t as smart as it should be” and is “not keeping us as safe as it should be”, he said. “Mass incarceration makes our country worse off and we need to do something about it.”

Reform advocates have said that both the president and Congress should do more for comprehensive reform, including changes to minimum sentences, probation programs, juvenile justice and the barriers to finding work and housing as former prisoners re-enter society.



Before the speech, Booker stressed the urgency of reform, saying that for minority communities, change was “a matter of life and death, a matter of having the American dream or being denied it”.

At an event hosted by the Coalition for Public Safety, a pro-reform venture, Obama was praised by Booker and Republican senator Mike Lee, who said: “What the president’s been doing and talking about this week will prove particularly helpful” for reforms.

At the talk, Lee described reforms “on the front end and the back end” of the system. “Front-end” reforms include reductions to mandatory minimum sentences as ways to decrease the costs of prison and “address some inequities”, he said, alluding to the disproportionate impact of the system on minorities. “Back-end” reforms proposed by others would expand rehabilitation programs for prisoners, including addiction treatment, family counseling and job training.

Many conservatives support reform in part because of the high cost of incarceration per person – an estimated $30,000 per person per year – while many Democrats are eager to reduce prison populations that disproportionately comprise black and Hispanic inmates.

The senators said that they hoped to send a bill to Obama’s desk by the end of the year.

On Monday, Obama granted clemency to 46 prisoners convicted on drug offenses, shortening some sentences by decades to a November release. Over six years he has commuted the sentences of 89 prisoners, more than any president since Lyndon B Johnson.

But the number represents a minuscule fraction of the almost 20,000 people who’ve petitioned the Justice Department, and the president’s clemency was not bestowed without criticism.

“If clemency is not the entire answer to the systemic problem of excessive sentences,” former US pardon attorney Margaret Love wrote in Crime Report, “it can still serve its time-honored function of pointing the way to a resolution through the legal system.”

Monday’s commutations are only “a drop in the bucket”, said Jeremy Haile, federal advocacy counsel for the non-profit Sentencing Project. Haile said that an estimated 7,000 people are still serving time under now-reformed statutes that sentenced crack cocaine offenders 100 times more severely than powder cocaine offenders.

In 2010, Congress passed a law that reduced the sentencing disparity to 18 to one, a ratio that reform advocates say must be brought to zero. More than 80% of people who have served or are serving sentences under the crack cocaine law are African American.

Aside from signing that bill into law, the Obama administration has made tentative steps toward reforming criminal justice, particularly with regard to the war on drugs. In 2013, then attorney general Eric Holder ordered prosecutors to avoid seeking the most severe drug sentence when charging some low-level drug offenders.

Between 70 and 100 million Americans have a criminal record for mostly minor nonviolent offenses, amounting to almost a third of the population.