How Prison Reform Became a Presidential Priority
"Obama’s prison visit would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. But organizing and advocacy created a new consensus."
This week in Philadelphia President Obama made a bold statement to a packed auditorium of NAACP members, “Mass incarceration makes our country worse off, and we need to do something about it.” Today, he becomes the first sitting president to visit a federal prison.
We should not forget how unlikely either the president’s statement or his prison visit would have been just a few years ago. President Obama’s rousing speech to the NAACP in 2009, a few months after the start of his presidency (and the start of my presidency of the NAACP), included just two fleeting references to criminal-justice reform.
At that same convention, the NAACP made it clear that we were going to double down on ending mass incarceration. It was not clear that the nation’s leaders shared our concern. What a difference a few years can make.
* This new consensus involves sending drug addicts to rehab instead of to prison. It involves ensuring that offenders who go into prison illiterate leave prison knowing how to read. It involves demanding that the Department of Corrections actually helps correct the paths of our neighbors who have lost their way.
* The president, himself a former organizer, is fond of quoting President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous charge to the then-preeminent black labor and civil-rights organizer, A. Phillip Randolph: I agree with you. I want to do it. Now make me do it.
This is what it looks like when organizers and leaders from both ends of the political spectrum unite to do just that. "
http://www.thenation.com/article/how-prison-reform-became-a-presidential-priority/
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