Barack Obama announced he would “ban the box” of criminal history questions on some government job applications, praising former inmates who had reintegrated with society and saying “it’s not too late” to break the cycles of the American justice system.



“We’ve got to make sure that people who’ve paid their debt to society can earn a second chance,” the president told an audience of lawmakers, ex-offenders, activists and students at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, on Monday.

“We can’t have the criminal justice system carrying the entire load of society’s ills.”

Obama said that he had directed federal agencies to “ban the box” and delay asking applicants about their criminal history until later in the hiring process. Activists have for years called for an end to the question at early stages of hiring, arguing that it fosters discrimination against ex-offenders who are trying to rebuild honest lives.

“We’re not suggesting ignore it,” Obama said of criminal records, before urging Congress to follow the example of his executive action, more than a dozen states and major corporations such as Koch Industries, Target and Walmart, all of which have stopped screening applicants based on the question.

The president also said that he had expanded education grant money for ex-offenders, one of several executive actions to improve re-entry programs for former inmates who often find themselves alone and unable to find housing or work in an alien America. Nearly one in three American adults has a criminal record, and a 2009 study found that 60-75% of ex-offenders were jobless up to a year after release.

“A lot of the time that record disqualifies you from being a full participant in our society, even if you’ve already paid your debt to society,” Obama said.

Instead of shuttling mostly black, Latino and poor people through a system of cells and poverty, Obama said repairing the criminal justice system’s many parts would help create “a virtuous cycle”.

“It means less crime, it means less recidivism, it means less money spent on incarceration,” he said, noting that more than 600,000 people are released from prison each year, and that it costs about $80bn to incarcerate more than 2.2 million inmates.

He used DeQuan Rosario, a former inmate he met earlier in the day touring Newark, as an example. Rosario, 37, spent more than a decade in federal prison on a drug offense, but, after leaving in 2013, managed to turn his life around with the help of a re-entry program. With the help of his probation officer, a US attorney, and a federal judge, he had completed training and is now an EMT in Essex County.

“Instead of peddling drugs that are destroying lives, he’s saving lives,” Obama said.

After the speech, Rosario, clad in a checkered red and black suit that Obama had described as “sharp”, told reporters: “Banning the box definitely helps.” He said that when employers see any jail time on an application, many toss it out immediately.

He also said that more than anything re-entry programs need more attention and funding, echoing the calls of activists who say that Congress needs to focus more on life after prison. “The programs are there, but there’s so many applicants,” Rosario said, leaving the clinics, employment centers and halfway houses short-staffed and underfunded.

Rosario also said he could hardly believe his afternoon with the president: “It’s like on a cloud, like a celebrity right now, like Brad Pitt.”

A group of senators have advanced a bill aimed at reducing mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenses, and a parallel bill in the House of Representatives includes a measure that would delay questions about criminal records for federal government jobs.

Representative Elijah Cummings, a Democrat behind that bill, praised Obama’s actions. The president’s steps would help “to reduce recidivism, break generational cycles of crime, and make our communities safer”, Cummings said.

The new programs will help with the “herculean task” of re-entry, former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey told reporters. “Re-entry can work if systems are integrated and readily accessible,” he said, adding that the ill-prepared men and women leaving prisons amounted to a “significant public policy crisis”.

The president has for months toured the nation in a loose campaign for reform, visiting police in Chicago, the NAACP in Philadelphia, and inmates in Oklahoma.

Obama’s speech ends a weekend during which about 6,000 drug offenders were granted early releases thanks to policy changes by the US Sentencing Commission, which made the revisions retroactive last year.

Republican senators have proven amenable to reform bills, but Obama’s opponents on the national stage have seized it as an opportunity to criticize him. Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor and a presidential candidate, has accused the president of not supporting police, saying in September that “lawlessness has been the rule of the day” under Obama.

The White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, replied to Christie on Monday by saying the governor’s remarks were unproductive politics. “They’re not surprising for somebody whose poll numbers are closer to an asterisk than they are double digits.”