President Obama has called for comprehensive reform of the US criminal justice system, including shorter sentences for certain drug offenses and the right to vote for convicted felons.

“Justice and redemption go hand in hand,” Obama said in a speech to the NAACP’s annual convention in downtown Philadelphia. “I see those young men on street corners and eventually in prisons, and I think to myself: ‘They could be me,’” he said. “The main difference between me and them is I had a more forgiving environment so that when I slipped up, when I made a mistake, I had a second chance.”

Obama called for shorter minimum mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, citing the sentences as the reason that the prison population has quadrupled from 500,000 in 1980 to more than 2.2 million today. “Our nation’s being robbed of men and women who could be workers and taxpayers,” Obama said, making appeals to both fiscal sense and empathy. Citing the $80bn yearly cost of the prison system, he said: “For $80bn we could have universal preschool for every child in America.”

Many support reform in part because of the high cost of incarceration per person – an estimated $30,000 per person per year – while many are eager to reduce prison populations that disproportionately comprise black and Hispanic inmates.

Between 70 and 100 million Americans have a criminal record for mostly minor nonviolent offenses, amounting to almost a third of the population.


haggadah Section: -- Ten Plagues
Source: YouTube and The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/14/obama-prison-reform-speech-naacp-philadelphia)