By just about every measure, the life chances for black and Hispanic youth still lag far behind those of their white peers. Our kids, America’s children, so often are isolated, without hope, less likely to graduate from high school, less likely to earn a college degree, less likely to be employed, less likely to have health insurance, less likely to own a home.
Part of this is a legacy of hundreds of years of slavery and segregation, and structural inequalities that compounded over generations. It did not happen by accident. Partly it’s a result of continuing, if sometimes more subtle, bigotry — whether in who gets called back for a job interview, or who gets suspended from school, or what neighborhood you are able to rent an apartment in. So we can’t be satisfied or not satisfied until the opportunity gap is closed for everybody in America.
But today, I want to focus on one aspect of American life that remains particularly skewed by race and by wealth, a source of inequity that has ripple effects on families and on communities and ultimately on our nation — and that is our criminal justice system.
There’s a long history of inequity in the criminal justice system in America. When I was in the state legislature in Illinois, we worked to make sure that we had videotaping of interrogations because there were some problems there. We set up racial profiling laws to prevent the kind of bias in traffic stops that too many people experience.
What has changed, though, is that, in recent years the eyes of more Americans have been opened to this truth. Partly because of cameras, partly because of tragedy, partly because the statistics cannot be ignored, we can’t close our eyes anymore.
So let’s look at the statistics. The United States is home to 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Our incarceration rate is four times higher than China’s. We keep more people behind bars than the top 35 European countries combined.
And it hasn’t always been the case. In 1980, there were 500,000 people behind bars in America – half a million people in 1980. Today there are 2.2 million. It has quadrupled since 1980. Our prison population has doubled in the last two decades alone.
If we’re going to deal with this problem and the inequities involved then we also have to speak honestly. There are some folks who need to be in jail. Murderers, predators, rapists, gang leaders, drug kingpins – we need some of those folks behind bars. Our communities are safer, thanks to brave police officers and hardworking prosecutors who put those violent criminals in jail.
And the studies show that up to a certain point, tougher prosecutors and stiffer sentences for these violent offenders contributed to the decline in violent crime over the last few decades. Although the science also indicates that you get a point of diminishing returns.
But here’s the thing: Over the last few decades, we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before. And that is the real reason our prison population is so high. In far too many cases, the punishment simply does not fit the crime. If you’re a low-level drug dealer, or you violate your parole, you owe some debt to society. You have to be held accountable and make amends. But you don’t owe 20 years. You don’t owe a life sentence.
And by the way, the taxpayers are picking up the tab for that price. Every year, we spend $80 billion to keep folks incarcerated. Now, just to put that in perspective, for $80 billion, we could have universal preschool for every 3-year-old and 4-year-old in America. For $80 billion, we could double the salary of every high school teacher in America. For $80 billion, we could finance new roads and new bridges and new airports, job training programs, research and development. For what we spend to keep everyone locked up for one year, we could eliminate tuition at every single one of our public colleges and universities.
And then, of course, there are costs that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. Because the statistics on who gets incarcerated show that by a wide margin, it disproportionately impacts communities of color. African Americans and Latinos make up 30 percent of our population; they make up 60 percent of our inmates. About one in every 35 African American men, one in every 88 Latino men is serving time right now. Among white men, that number is one in 214.
The bottom line is that in too many places, black boys and black men, Latino boys and Latino men experience being treated differently under the law.
This is not just barbershop talk. A growing body of research shows that people of color are more likely to be stopped, frisked, questioned, charged, detained. African Americans are more likely to be arrested. They are more likely to be sentenced to more time for the same crime. And one of the consequences of this is, around one million fathers are behind bars. Around one in nine African American kids has a parent in prison.
What is that doing to our communities? What’s that doing to those children? Our nation is being robbed of men and women who could be workers and taxpayers, could be more actively involved in their children’s lives, could be role models, could be community leaders, and right now they’re locked up for a non-violent offense.
My administration has taken steps on our own to reduce our federal prison population. So I signed a bill reducing the 100-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. I’ve commuted the sentences of dozens of people sentenced under old drug laws that we now recognize were unfair, and yesterday I announced that I’m commuting dozens more.
Under the leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder – now continued by Loretta Lynch – federal prosecutors got what he called “Smart on Crime,” which is refocusing efforts on the worst offenders, pursuing mandatory minimum sentences 20 percent less often than they did the year before. The idea is you don’t always have to charge the max. To be a good prosecutor, you need to be proportionate. And it turns out that we’re solving just as many cases and there are just as many plea bargains, and it’s working.
And recently, something extraordinary happened. For the first time in 40 years, America’s crime rate and incarceration rate both went down at the same time. That happened last year.
I want to spend the rest of my time just laying out some basic principles, some simple ideas for what reform should look like. And I’m going to focus on what happens in three places – in the community, in the courtroom and in the cell block.
So I want to begin with the community because I believe crime is like any other epidemic – the best time to stop it is before it even starts. And I’m going to go ahead and say what I’ve said a hundred times before or a thousand times before: if we make investments early in our children, we will reduce the need to incarcerate those kids.
So one study found that for every dollar we invest in pre-K, we save at least twice that down the road in reduced crime. Getting a teenager a job for the summer costs a fraction of what it costs to lock him up for 15 years. Investing in our communities makes sense. It saves taxpayer money if we are consistent about it.
What doesn’t make sense is treating entire neighborhoods as little more than danger zones where we just surround them. We ask police to go in there and do the tough job of trying to contain the hopelessness when we are not willing to make the investments to help lift those communities out of hopelessness.
Places like West Philly, or West Baltimore, or Ferguson, Missouri – they’re part of America, too. They’re not separate. They’re part of America like anywhere else. The kids there are American kids, just like your kids and my kids. So we’ve got to make sure boys and girls in those communities are loved and cherished and supported and nurtured and invested in.
If you are a parent, you know that there are times where boys and girls are going to act out in school. And the question is, are we letting principals and parents deal with one set of kids and we call the police on another set of kids? That’s not the right thing to do.
We’ve got to make sure our juvenile justice system remembers that kids are different. Don’t just tag them as future criminals. Reach out to them as future citizens.
So these are steps in the community that will lead to fewer folks being arrested in the first place. Now, they won’t eliminate crime entirely. There’s going to be crime. That’s why the second place we need to change is in the courtroom.
For nonviolent drug crimes, we need to lower long mandatory minimum sentences – or get rid of them entirely. Give judges some discretion around nonviolent crimes so that, potentially, we can steer a young person who has made a mistake in a better direction.
We should pass a sentencing reform bill through Congress this year. We need to ask prosecutors to use their discretion to seek the best punishment, the one that’s going to be most effective, instead of just the longest punishment. We should invest in alternatives to prison, like drug courts and treatment and probation programs which ultimately can save taxpayers thousands of dollars per defendant each year.
Now, even if we’re locking up fewer people, even if we are reforming sentencing guidelines, some criminals still deserve to go to jail. And as Republican Senator John Cornyn has reminded us, “virtually all of the people incarcerated in our prisons will eventually someday be released.” And that’s why the third place we need to reform is in the cell block.
While the people in our prisons have made some mistakes – and sometimes big mistakes – they are also Americans, and we have to make sure that as they do their time and pay back their debt to society that we are increasing the possibility that they can turn their lives around.
And that’s why 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.
I’ve asked my Attorney General to start a review of the overuse of solitary confinement across American prisons. The social science shows that an environment like that is often more likely to make inmates more alienated, more hostile, potentially more violent. Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or even years at a time? That is not going to make us safer.
Our prisons should be a place where we can train people for skills that can help them find a job, not train them to become more hardened criminals. Let’s reward prisoners with reduced sentences if they complete programs that make them less likely to commit a repeat offense. Let’s invest in innovative new approaches to link former prisoners with employers and help them stay on track.
Let’s follow the growing number of our states and cities and private companies who have decided to “Ban the Box” on job applications so that former prisoners who have done their time and are now trying to get straight with society have a decent shot in a job interview. And if folks have served their time, and they’ve reentered society, they should be able to vote.
But we can’t ask our police, or our prosecutors, or our prison guards, or our judges to bear the entire burden of containing and controlling problems that the rest of us are not facing up to and willing to do something about.
We have to stand up to those who are determined to slash investments in our communities at any cost – cutting preschool programs, cutting job-training programs, cutting affordable housing programs, cutting community policing programs. That’s shortsighted. Those investments make this country strong. We’ve got to invest in opportunity more than ever.
An African American man born roughly 25 years ago has just a one-in-two chance of being employed today. More than one in three African American children are growing up in poverty. When America’s unemployment rate was 9.5 percent, when I first came into office, as it was going up, we properly recognized this is a crisis. Right now, the unemployment rate among African Americans is 9.5 percent. What should we call that? It is a crisis. And we have to be just as concerned about continuing to lift up job opportunities for these young people.
Edited from remarks made at the NAACP Convention in Philadelphia on Tuesday, July 14. Video: http://www.c-span.org/video/?327099-4/president-obama-remarks-naacp.
