Obama visits federal prison

Afterward, the president told reporters the justice system needs to start distinguishing between young people who make mistakes and truly unsafe criminals. Obama echoed the voices of many Republicans, Democrats and Libertarians in a speech pushing for criminal justice reform.

President Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit a federal prison Thursday.

“We have to consider whether this is the smartest way for us to both control crime and to rehabilitate individuals”, Obama said during his El Reno visit.

“When they describe their youth and their childhood, these are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made”, Obama said.

Earlier this week, Obama commuted the sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders, 14 of whom had been serving life in prison.

With about 4% of the world’s population, the US has more than 20% of its prisoners. They make up 60 percent of our inmates. “What is normal is teenagers doing stupid things”, Obama said after touring the facility and visiting with the six inmates.

After meeting with the six prisoners chosen for his special trip, Obama toured a small cell to gather what he could about living conditions in the nation’s prisons. Though his numbers are off by a bit, Obama’s overall point – that we’ve amped up our rate of incarceration – is correct. One solution is to require inmates to try and get their GED before release, so they have some minimum qualifications.

He used those stats to bolster his case for broad criminal justice reform, calling the criminal justice system an “injustice system”. But the president should not pretend that the growth in incarceration is only, or even mostly, a function of the war on drugs.

Up on Capitol Hill, ideas have made it into a group of bills that are moving toward floor votes.

The AFL-CIO did, however, dismiss the Koch Brothers. They’re also part of the movement.

Suited agents remained just feet away from the President at all times Thursday, despite the lack of inmates.

Obama has criticized the War on Drugs as a failed policy. The result? The number of people behind bars skyrocketed from 500,000 in 1980 to more than 2.2 million today.

The president should keep applying pressure and securing relief for prisoners with unjust sentences, but he cannot do it alone. He fears the push for reform is shortsighted and unsafe. In a March interview with The Wire creator David Simon, he said, “folks go in at great expense to the state, many times train to become more hardened criminals while in prison, come out and are basically unemployable”. So, crime is at its lowest levels in a generation.

Those caught up in our punitive criminal justice system are disproportionately black, Latino, and poor, a result of both skewed and often-racist law enforcement and an economic structure which leaves large-swathes of historically-marginalized communities with few opportunities and curtailed access to a shrinking public sector and the public goods provided therein.

STEVE WASSERMAN: Incarceration does reduce crime. Do you think they deserve what Obama is offering them?

For the PBS NewsHour, I am Lisa Desjardins in Washington.