President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison yesterday. Obama said it was a good chance to talk about prison reform, and to catch up with so many former congressmen.
Our reforms to criminal record disclosure will benefit ex-offenders, but there will a broader, more significant payoff for everyone in society.
Employment is key to reducing recidivism.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
Studies have shown that inmate participation in education, vocational and job training, prison work skills development, drug abuse, mental health and other treatment programs, all reduce recidivism, significantly.
What makes a lot of sense is that, while people are incarcerated, give them the tools they need to be able to have a productive, lucrative living when they leave so they can provide for their families and break that cycle of recidivism.
Keeping them behind bars does little to reduce crime, but it does a lot to tear apart families, our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions.
I feel like it had an impact, in that it started the attention that has been paid to what was happening. It started to get us into this whole conversation about prison reform, the whole bipartisan dialogue that's been happening over the past five, six years about this, where you have a Van Jones and a Newt Gingrich, and you have the Rick Perrys and so forth getting up and talking about the need to reform.
In January 2013, I told the people in the Justice Department after the re-election that I wanted to focus on reforming the federal criminal justice system. I made an announcement in August of that year in San Francisco, when we rolled out the Smart on Crime initiative.
In the very progress of society, the prison has in the very nature of things undergone some improvement, but there are vast stretches yet to be covered before the prison becomes, if it ever does, an institution for the reclamation and rehabilitation of erring and unfortunate men and women.
In his recent book, When Brute Force Fails, UCLA's Kleiman argues that new strategies for targeting repeat offenders--including reforms to make probation an effective sanction rather than a feckless joke--could cut crime and reduce prison populations simultaneously. Safer communities, in turn, might produce more hopeful and well-disciplined kids.
Trying to explain the First Step Act in prison reform in a tweet or Facebook post is not easy.
Restoring a person's ability to achieve success when they leave the prison walls promotes public safety, builds our economy and, most importantly, is the right thing to do.
We need to have more second chance programs. I'm glad that we're ending private prisons in the federal system; I want to see them ended in the state system.
Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.
Criminality should be exterminated by disabling all notorious and irreclaimable criminals.
There's nothing conservative about allowing ourselves to become so inured to a 'tough on crime' frame of mind that we would abandon tested alternatives that can yield better outcomes.
We will never build enough prisons to end our crime problem.
Social-enterprise employees earn wages and pay taxes, reducing their recidivism rates and dependence on government assistance. They also receive crucial on-the-job training, job-readiness skills, literacy instruction and, if necessary, the counseling and mental-health services they need to move into the mainstream workforce.
There is a direct correlation between education, stable families and incarceration and crime.
What does this system seem designed to do? As I see it, it seems designed to send people right back to prison, which is what happens about 70% of the time.
So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it's mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime.
We lose our right to be surprised that California has the highest recidivism rate in the country if we refuse to hire folks who have taken responsibility for their crimes and have done their time.
Let's stop wasting billions of dollars on prisons, which send people home who are too often less capable and more damaged than when they went in. We would have safer neighborhoods if we spent the same money on true rehabilitation, job training, employment and entrepreneurship.
I worked when I was Congress on a second chance act. We have got to do a better job recognizing and correcting the errors in the system that do reflect on institutional bias in criminal justice. But what - what - what Donald Trump and I are saying is let's not have the reflex of assuming the worst of men and women in law enforcement. We truly do believe that law enforcement is not a force for racism or division in our country.
