Photographed through a prison cell window, U.S. President Barack Obama tours the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution after Obama in El Reno, Oklahoma July 16, 2015. Obama is the first sitting president to visit a federal prison.KEVIN LAMARQUE/Reuters
Last Friday, with little fanfare, the White House launched a pilot program to offer financial aid to prisoners.
It's not a particularly new idea. Until former president Bill Clinton signed a bill prohibiting inmates from receiving federal grants in 1994, prisoners who wanted to advance their education could ask Washington for financial support.
Now, as President Barack Obama makes prison reform one of the major policy issues of his final year in office, the federal government is trying once more to improve the rehabilitation opportunities for American prisoners – a group that makes up a quarter of the entire planet's inmates.
Although temporarily overshadowed by national crises over race relations, gun control and myriad social issues, imprisonment rates have long been one of America's most intractable domestic problems. The U.S. sends more of its citizens to jail than almost anywhere else in the world – roughly 7 million in 2013, according to the most recent numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. About one out of every 35 people in the country is under some sort of correctional supervision.
Many of the country's other social challenges are readily visible in its imprisonment statistics. Black and Latino men are several times more likely to go to prison than their white counterparts. A majority of prisoners have not completed high school. The incarceration rate throughout much of the South is substantially higher than the national average. Even as the federal prison population in America has dropped slightly over the last decade, the demographic and social makeup of those imprisoned remains unchanged.
Mr. Obama's central argument in advocating for correctional reform is simple: The U.S. jails far too many young people, disproportionately by race and overwhelmingly for drug crimes. And once they end up in prison, they are likely to stay there.
"When we're looking at non-violent offenders, most of them growing up in environments in which drug traffic is common, where many of their family members may have been involved in the drug trade, we have to reconsider whether 20-year or 30-year or life sentences for non-violent crimes is the best way for us to solve these problems," the President said during a recent trip to the El Reno Correctional Institution in El Reno, Okla. He became the first sitting president in U.S. history to visit a federal jail.
There is little doubt that the U.S. imprisonment rate is intertwined with the war on drugs. Driven in large part by a desire to focus limited police resources on higher-level crimes, a number of states have recently legalized marijuana possession, and in a partially symbolic move, the President timed his prison visit with a decision to commute the sentences of 46 low-level drug offenders.
But even as President Obama sought to frame his call for reform as a policy founded in societal justice, the truth is that in many parts of the country, prison reform is necessitated by something much more pragmatic – money.
Throughout the U.S., the rate at which inmates are sent to prison easily eclipses the rate at which federal and state authorities spend money on support services for those inmates. The result is an overcrowded prison system whose population is at a heightened risk to reoffend.
In California, the problem became so severe that voters recently passed a motion that reclassified a variety of non-violent crimes from felonies to misdemeanours. As the prison population begins to fall, the state stands to save between $100-million (U.S.) and $200-million in related costs next year.
Cognizant that current incarceration rates are likely untenable (if not in social terms, then in financial ones), a number of Republicans and Democrats have come together to work on prison-reform proposals. But any overarching reforms will likely face at least some resistance – for decades, politicians at virtually every level of office have found it much easier to justify legislation that makes life more difficult for inmates, not easier.
There is, of course, one particular prison that President Obama has been fighting to close for the entirety of his time in office: the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, a facility that houses fewer than 120 inmates at a cost of $100-million a year. That particular battle, however, is likely to prove far more challenging than any domestic prison reform.