Barack Obama is putting an exclamation
point on his recent call for criminal justice reform by becoming the first
sitting President to visit a federal prison Thursday.
Obama arrived at the El Reno
Correctional Institution in El Reno, Oklahoma, on Thursday morning to meet with
inmates and law enforcement. Oklahomans sitting on parked cars watched as the
motorcade whizzed by and arrived at the light brown brick prison, surrounded by
barbed wire. "I think we have a tendency sometimes to almost take for
granted or think it's normal that so many young people end up in our criminal
justice system. It's not normal. It's not what happens in other countries. What
is normal is a teenager doing stupid things," Obama said after touring the
facility and visiting with the six inmates. Obama spoke briefly to the press
after meeting with six inmates and he again made his push for prison and
sentencing reform, saying "What is normal is young people make
mistakes," and that the only difference between the inmates and most Americans
are "resources," and "social support structures."
"This is part of our effort to
highlight both the challenges and opportunities we face with respect to the
criminal justice system," Obama said on Thursday.
As part of the security for the
first-time trip, media and others were required to leave their cell phones outside
the prison. Obama also plans to conduct an interview with VICE that will be
included in an HBO documentary on the nation's criminal justice system.
The President has made overhauling the
nation's criminal justice system one of his top domestic priorities as his time
in office wanes. "My goal is that we start seeing some improvements at the
federal level and that we're then able to see states across the country pick up
the baton, and there are already some states that leading the way in both
sentencing reform as well as prison reform and make sure that we're seeing what
works and build off that," Obama said Thursday.
He commuted the sentences of 46
low-level drug offenders Monday. The next day he made his pitch for an overhaul
of the criminal justice system to the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People at the group's annual conference in Philadelphia. "In
too many places, black boys and black men, and Latino boys and Latino men,
experience being treated different under the law," Obama told the group. "Mass
incarceration makes our country worse off and we need to do something about
it." Support for criminal justice reform has become a rare area of
bipartisan interest, drawing support from Democrats and Republicans, including
Sen. Rand Paul, a 2016 contender.
The drive comes two decades after
former President Bill Clinton enacted strict new federal sentencing rules which
helped jam pack the nation's prisons in the ensuing years.
Clinton admitted his role in the
problem this past May in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour. "The
problem is the way it was written and implemented is we cast too wide a net and
we had too many people in prison," Clinton said. "And we wound
up...putting so many people in prison that there wasn't enough money left to
educate them, train them for new jobs and increase the chances when they came
out so they could live productive lives."
It also comes at a crucial, yet
unrelated moment for the president, as he pushes hard for the sweeping deal
with Iran that he says will prevent the country from building its first nuclear
bomb. CNN
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