WASHINGTON — Calling it an issue America can’t afford to ignore, President Barack Obama on Thursday laid out an expansive vision for fixing the criminal justice system by focusing on communities, courtrooms and cellblocks. He announced a federal review of the use of solitary confinement and urged Congress to pass a sentencing reform bill by year’s end.
In a speech to the NAACP’s annual convention, Obama also called for voting rights to be restored to felons who have served their sentences, and said employers should “ban the box” asking job candidates about their past convictions. He said long mandatory minimum sentences now in place should be reduced — or discarded entirely.
“In far too many cases, the punishment simply doesn’t fit the crime,” Obama told a crowd of 3,300 in Philadelphia. Low-level drug dealers, for example, owe a debt to society, but not a life sentence or 20-year prison term, he said.
With his speech to the prominent African-American advocacy group, Obama sought to put a spotlight on the need for new legislation as he mounted a weeklong push on criminal justice reform. A day earlier, Obama commuted the sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders — the most commutations a president has issued on a single day in at least four decades.
Upon arriving Tuesday in Philadelphia, Obama met with a number of former prisoners to discuss their experience re-entering society, the White House said. And on Thursday, Obama planned to put a personal face on the nation’s mushrooming prison population with a visit El Reno Federal Correctional Institution outside of Oklahoma City — the first visit to a federal prison by a sitting U.S. president.