In the same week he would become the first sitting U.S. president to visit a federal prison – which is in itself unbelievable – President Barack Obama gave a stirring speech to the NAACP Convention in Philadelphia on Tuesday, July 14 about the need for criminal justice reform in this country. These remarks deserve close attention, because they include plain facts about a national crisis and pointed, credible suggestions for addressing that crisis on many fronts.
It’s worth restating some of the statistics cited by Obama, while reflecting that the president of the United States is projecting these facts, not some fringe activist or academic criminologist. 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 this huge explosion in incarceration rates is recent. In 1980, there were 500,000 people behind bars in America, while today there are 2.2 million. Our prison population has quadrupled since 1980 and doubled in the last two decades.
While all Americans are paying for this – to the tune of $80 billion a year – the suffering and stigma of incarceration 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 and one in every 88 Latino men is serving time right now, compared to one in 214 white men. Around one in nine African American kids has a parent in prison.
Though Obama acknowledged that there are many people who do belong in prison, the so-called War on Drugs and hawkish sentencing guidelines have choked our prisons with people who pose little or no threat to society. “Over the last few decades, we’ve locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before,” Obama said. “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.”
Obama has already signed a bill reducing the 100-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, which was essentially racism in narcotics sentencing. But in his last year and a half in the White House, he clearly plans to do more to address this crisis.
“For nonviolent drug crimes, we need to lower long mandatory minimum sentences – or get rid of them entirely,” Obama said. “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.”
He urged reform of conditions in U.S. prisons, including a dangerous and sadistic over-reliance on solitary confinement, as well as conditions that prisoners meet upon release. He recommended removing the felon box from job applications – as the Slay administration commendably did for people applying to work for the City of St. Louis – and restoring to felons the right to vote once they have served their time.
Obama also took a much wider view of the problem, and spoke on behalf of public funding for programs that help develop children into the kinds of citizens who do not commit crimes. Sounding one of our own most dearly held themes, he cited a research finding that for every dollar we invest in pre-K education, we save at least twice that down the road in reduced crime. The president put that finding in the context of the $80 billion our nation is spending each year on incarcerating people. “To put that in perspective,” Obama said, “for $80 billion we could have universal preschool for every 3-year-old and 4-year-old in America.”
To look at the nightmares of crime and prison in America and, in response, to imagine universal early childhood education in this country – this is, indeed, a president who is showing he knows what is best for our community and who is fighting for those best interests. As Obama told the NAACP, “We’ve got to invest in opportunity more than ever.”
