WASHINGTON — As President Barack Obama prepares to transfer power to President-elect Donald Trump, the President spoke out about the state of the criminal justice system — specifically the role of the executive branch in directing its improvement. In an essay published Jan. 5 in the Harvard Law Review, titled “The President’s Role in Advancing Criminal Justice Reform,” the President wrote that those privileged to serve in the executive branch have an obligation to enhance the fairness and effectiveness of the justice system at all phases.

“How we treat citizens who make mistakes (even serious mistakes), pay their debt to society and deserve a second chance reflects who we are as a people and reveals a lot about our character and commitment to our founding principles,” President Obama wrote. “And how we police our communities and the kinds of problems we ask our criminal justice system to solve can have a profound impact on the extent of trust in law enforcement and significant implications for public safety.”

President Obama pointed to steps taken during his administration to advance sentencing reform and help youthful offenders avoid the cycle of crime and incarceration.
Photo Credit: Pete Souza

President Obama referred to his firsthand experience witnessing how the current criminal justice system exacerbates inequality; however, he also pointed to a number of bipartisan steps taken during his presidency to advance sentencing reform and help youthful offenders avoid the cycle of crime and incarceration.

Noting that the U.S. accounts for just 5 percent of the world’s population, but nearly 25 percent of its incarcerated population, the President wrote that the country “cannot afford to spend $80 billion annually on incarceration, to write off the seventy million Americans…with some form of criminal record, to release 600,000 inmates each year without a better program to reintegrate them into society, or to ignore the humanity of 2.2 million men and women currently in U.S. jails…”

Despite the stigmas and restrictions — including barriers to employment, voting, education, housing and public benefits — as well as racial disparities in arrest and conviction rates, the President also pointed to successes gained with the Smart on Crime initiative. Among other things, the initiative revised charging policies to avoid triggering excessive mandatory minimums for low-level, nonviolent drug offenders. The president also outlined the benefits of reforming policies on restrictive housing, which he called both overused and counterproductive. These views led the president to direct Attorney General Loretta Lynch in January 2016 to ban solitary confinement for juveniles, prohibit its use as a response to low-level infractions, expand treatment of those with mental illness, increase the amount of time inmates spend out of their cells and ensure inmates are not released into communities directly from solitary confinement.

The President further noted the success of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), a public-private partnership between the Department of Justice and the Pew Charitable Trusts launched in 2010 to help states devise better criminal justice policies and practices. “Through JRI, over two dozen states have enacted a wide range of reforms to make their criminal justice systems operate more efficiently and effectively,” President Obama wrote.

Among his administration’s unfinished work, President Obama listed passing sentencing reform legislation, taking steps to reduce gun violence, and addressing opioid misuse and addiction. The outgoing president would also have liked to see more progress in identifying wrongful convictions as well as overall improvements to criminal justice data collection. For inmates preparing for re-entry and those who have already transitioned out of incarceration, President Obama had also hoped to make headway in restoring their rights to vote.

“There is so much work to be done. Yet I remain hopeful that together, we are moving in the right direction,” President Obama wrote.

He added, however, that those entrusted with influence over the direction of the criminal justice system must also remember that reform is about more than the dollars spent and the data collected.

“How we treat those who have made mistakes speaks to who we are as a society and is a statement about our values — about our dedication to fairness, equality and justice, and about how to protect our families and communities from harm, heal after loss and trauma, and lift back up those among us who have earned a chance at redemption,” he concluded.