Criminal justice reform long overdue
President Barack Obama wants to make criminal justice reform a signature domestic accomplishment of his final 18 months in office. For too long, the federal government has focused on inflexible, tough-on-crime prison policies and sentences, especially as they apply to nonviolent drug offenders. It’s time to move toward a more nuanced approach that favors second chances over punishment.
Texas provides a model for reform. Almost a decade ago, Texas lawmakers balked at the cost of building and maintaining new prisons and began putting into place alternatives to prison for people convicted of low-level, nonviolent offenses. New laws were passed that favored probation, counseling and treatment over incarceration. The decline in the state’s prison population that followed has allowed Texas to close prisons and save hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars without compromising public safety.
To bring attention to his goal of shifting the federal government’s focus from punishment to rehabilitation, Obama last week commuted the sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders, some of whom shockingly had been sentenced to life in prison. He also spoke to the NAACP about his hopes for overhauling the nation’s criminal justice system and toured a federal prison near Oklahoma City, where he met with a half-dozen nonviolent drug offenders.
“When they describe their youth and their childhood, these are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different from the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made,” Obama told reporters afterward. “The difference is, they did not have the kind of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.”
Low-risk, nonviolent drug offenders deserve a chance to rebuild their lives. An important first step is eliminating mandatory minimum prison sentences for nonviolent drug crimes — one of the major reforms Obama strongly favors. And a criminal history should not be an automatic barrier to a job. A life cannot be rebuilt if a past mistake makes employment all but impossible.
Disproportionately harsh prison sentences, particularly for nonviolent drug crimes, are to blame for dramatically increasing the nation’s prison population the past few decades. Overall, 500,000 people were in federal and state prison systems in 1980. That figure has since quadrupled to more than 2.2 million. It does not speak well of our country in that although the United States makes up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it has more than 20 percent of the world’s prison population.
At the federal level, the number of inmates grew from 24,640 in 1980 to 207,800 today. The dramatic increase has meant an equally dramatic increase in the cost of operating federal prisons. The U.S. Justice Department spends $80 billion on its prison system each year — about 1,700 percent more than it spent in 1980.
And as Obama noted during his speech last Tuesday to the NAACP, America’s criminal justice system is “skewed by race and by wealth.” African-American men are more than six times as likely as white men to be incarcerated in federal and state prisons, while 37.5 percent of federal prisoners are black. The unequal prosecution of the nation’s drug laws in particular has disproportionately affected African-Americans, especially black men ages 25 to 54.
The usual reaction from the Republican-controlled Congress is to oppose Obama on everything he seeks, but there is hope Congress will pass criminal justice legislation before he leaves office. In no small measure, Obama trails Congress on the issue, as a growing awareness in Congress of how harmful many of the nation’s drug laws have been has led to bipartisan coalitions promoting change.
Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn and several of his Senate colleagues, both Republican and Democratic, have filed various reform bills the past couple of Congresses. One piece of legislation would restore some of the sentencing flexibility judges lost when the Reagan administration began hardening federal sentencing laws in the 1980s. Another would offer inmates who are considered at low risk of committing another crime early release from prison if they complete education, job training and treatment programs.
Politics appear to be aligning for the federal government finally to be as smart on crime as it has been tough on crime. The moment to create a fairer criminal justice system should not be lost. A fairer criminal justice system is a more moral, less harmful and less expensive criminal justice system.