Obama takes on prison reform

Obama takes on prison reform - Yahoo News

Washington (AFP) - With a ban on solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons, Barack
Obama is pushing to reform an overcrowded and expensive correctional system in a country that
locks up more people per capita than any other nation.
In an op-ed piece published in Tuesday editions of The Washington Post, the US president -- who
issued the ban via executive order -- confirmed he wanted to "rethink" the fate of some 100,000
prisoners who spend 23 of every 24 hours locked in a tiny cell.
He also announced executive actions barring corrections officials from dumping prisoners
responsible for "low-level infractions" in solitary, where inmates are cut off from almost all human
contact.
Obama's reforms are expected to affect about 10,000 inmates. He said he hoped they serve as a
model for US states to rethink their rules about a practice which many say has devastating
psychological effects.
"Solitary is profoundly mentally destructive, especially when administered to children and young
adults," Fordham Law School professor John Pfaff told AFP.
Obama cited the "heartbreaking" case of New Yorker Kalief Browder, who spent nearly two years in
solitary confinement at the city's huge, violent Rikers Island jail complex as a teenager. He was
released without ever going on trial.
His alleged crime? He stole a backpack.

Browder, unable to recover, committed suicide when he was just 22.

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US President Barack Obama speaks about
the re-entry process for formerly incarcerated individuals an ...
- 'Second chances' Solitary confinement "is not going to make us safer," Obama said last year, as he started looking at
prison reform.
"The social science shows that an environment like that is often more likely to make inmates more
alienated, more hostile, potentially more violent."
This is why Obama is also seeking to http://www.tropicabeachhotel.com/how-to-make-a-woman-cum/
cut the number of people incarcerated, curb the use of solitary confinement for the overall prison
population and end mandatory minimum sentences.
Stressing that America is a nation of "redemption" and "second chances," he limited to 60 days the
first solitary confinement period for a first-time offender.
In addition to the huge financial burden it places on US taxpayers, the prison system also has an
enormous population of some 2.2 million detainees. That accounts for about a quarter of the world's
prison population.

The cells are filled with drug addicts and the mentally ill, who have almost no chances of returning
to society if they spend time in solitary confinement.

View gallery
Fences and barbed wire are seen at the
entrance of the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in E ...
For those detainees, Obama hopes to offer alternatives to solitary.

- 'Common humanity' But unveiling these plans just months before a presidential election, as Republicans seeking the
White House have lashed out at Obama's weakness, is also a gamble for the president.
In large part, they go against the tide of what a large part of the American population believes about
crime and punishment -- mainly, that keeping people in prison longer, and sometimes in isolation,
reduces crime rates.
Most Americans -- 56 percent, according to a 2013 YouGov poll -- say that solitary confinement, a
practice in place for two centuries in the US, is an appropriate punishment in some circumstances.
In the 1980s and 1990s, stiffer penalties were put in place for a variety of crimes, leading to even
more crowded prisons. Today, the US prison system is at more than 100 percent capacity, according
to various groups researching the issue.
In choosing to enact his reforms through executive actions, rather than going through the legislative
process in a Republican-dominated Congress, Obama is exposing himself to accusations of abuse of
power.
Obama has already resorted to such measures on hot-button issues like gun control and
immigration, in order to bypass a hostile Congress.
But "criminal justice reform is actually one thing that seems to have political support on both sides
of the political aisle," said Matthew Hale of Seton Hall University.
"So while the president should expect some attacks of 'overreach' on the far right, he is probably
safer with this executive action than he was on immigration, for example," Hale told AFP.
And Obama's prison reform is also highly symbolic, its efforts likely to have little real impact, since
just 26 of the 200,000 federal inmates are juveniles.
"The policy directive, then, is aimed more at trying to inspire states to reform their policies towards
juveniles," Pfaff said.
"In that sense, I think it is driven by an interest in 'common humanity'," he added, referring back to
Obama's op-ed piece.
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