In its investigation of the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, the U.S. Department of Justice found that the city relied heavily for revenue from fines for such minor offenses as jaywalking or untended lawns that it enforced most often against members of African-American communities. The city issued arrest warrants not based on public safety needs, but as a routine response to fine payments, investigators found.
We are reminded of that more recently by President Obama, who in an article for the Harvard Law Review discusses the president’s role in advancing criminal justice reform. The 50-page article summarizes many of the statistics that may be all too familiar to people in communities of color.
Roughly 2.2 million U.S. adults were housed in federal, state or local jails at the end of 2015 (the most recent year for such data), down about 2% from a year earlier. While blacks and Hispanics constitute roughly 30% of the population, they comprise half the prison population. As the president notes, though evidence suggests no statistically significant difference in drug use across races and ethnicities, the arrest and conviction rate for African-Americans is much higher.
For similar offenses, the president writes, “members of African American and Hispanic communities are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, and sentenced to harsher penalties.”
The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but incarcerates nearly 35% of the world’s prisoners. That’s four times the world average and more than the 35 largest European countries combined. About one-third of adults – an estimated 70 million Americans – have a criminal record, which brings with it barriers to voting, employment, housing and the safety net.
“We simply cannot afford to spend $80 billion annually on incarceration, to write off… one in three adults… to release 600,000 inmates each year without a better program to reintegrate them into society, or to ignore the humanity of… men and women currently in U.S. jails and prisons,” Obama writes. “In addition, we cannot deny the legacy of racism that continues to drive inequality in how the justice system is experienced by so many Americans.”
The president outlines a series of changes that would make the criminal justice system fairer and more effective. They range from reform of sentencing laws and improvements in the system of public education and juvenile justice, to curtailing use of solitary confinement, reducing gun violence and restoring rights of those who have paid their debts to society.
He also notes his commuting the sentences of more than 1,000 people, the vast majority of whom had already served much more time than the sentence they would receive today and each of whom had obtained a GED, addressed substance abuse that led to their conviction or learned skills for future employment.
“This is an effort that has touched me personally, and not just because I could have been caught up in the system myself had I not gotten some breaks as a kid,” the president writes.
In 1990, Barack Obama, then 28, was elected the first black president in the 104-year history of the Harvard Law Review. The law review’s current president, Michael Zuckerman, along with its articles chair, invited Obama to contribute the article.
As it happens, Zuckerman was arrested and pleaded guilty to criminal trespass 16 years ago, at age 13, for trying to steal alcohol from a family he knew was away. The court assigned him to community service, which included doing art projects with homeless children who lived in motels.
The experience, Zuckerman told The Washington Post, underscored for him his privilege and taught him to redirect his energy into more productive things than stealing liquor. “So being able to publish a piece in which the president of the United States talks about the importance of second chances is very meaningful to me personally,” Zuckerman said.