President Obama became the first sitting president in history to visit a federal prison Thursday when he toured the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma. After passing through several security gates, Obama stepped inside a 9-by-10-foot cell and walked through a section called Cell Block B that houses prisoners who are part of a drug rehabilitation and prevention program. He also spent about 45 minutes meeting with six nonviolent drug offenders.
Maya Schenwar talking:
we have to acknowledge that this is unusual and commendable. And it’s interesting that we’re at a moment in history, a strange moment, where, fairly quickly, prison reform has become something acceptable to talk about in the mainstream, that a president visiting a prison actually earns him points. I think that the fact that he actually met with incarcerated people definitely was a positive thing. The way he talked about their shared humanity was definitely encouraging. And also, he did speak about the injustice of these long, excruciating sentences that have been prompted by mandatory minimums.
I do want to push back on a couple of things he said. One was this giant emphasis that he placed on distinguishing nonviolent and violent “offenders” behind bars. And the thing that he emphasized was kind of drawing this thick line, where some people are the people who just do stupid things, like all of us, as he said, and then there are the hardened, violent criminals. And I think drawing this line really causes us to discard huge numbers of people. Really, in state prisons, half of the people behind bars have been convicted of violent offenses. Many of those violent offenses are prompted by the same structural oppression, the same structural racism, structural economic violence, that leads to these nonviolent offenses. And I think we have to take that structural violence seriously and not discard these people. I also think it’s important to think about them as individuals and think about whether we would want to be judged for the worst thing possibly we ever did. And so, I think drawing that line, that’s something that’s being done across the board with this mainstream rhetoric on bipartisan prison reform, and it’s something that we have to challenge.
in Clinton’s rhetoric and a lot of the discussion around bipartisan prison reform, which has really been spurred a lot by conservatives—the conservative group Right on Crime, the Koch brothers, Newt Gingrich—all of these people who now are very vocally speaking out for prison reform, a lot of what they are talking about is money. They’re talking about how much prison costs: $80 billion, we’re wasting all this money on incarcerating people, we could be doing other things.
And I think, while it’s important, obviously, that mass incarceration is being challenged, we need to step back a little bit and think about whether this is where we want to place our emphasis, because, first of all, a lot of the legislation being proposed in Congress to sort of right some of these wrongs is taking that money that would be saved by decarcerating some people who are in federal prison, and redirecting it into what they call “public safety measures,” like local police forces. So, that money isn’t being channeled into early childhood education or mental healthcare or real community resources that would promote lasting safety. A lot of the strategy going on is really about heightening policing in various ways and channeling that money into people who are really at the start of that prison pipeline. The police are the gateway to prison. And we know that police forces are imbued with racism and anti-blackness. They grew out of slave patrols. So I think we really have to challenge that idea of kind of easy reinvestment, and also just the emphasis on taking dollars from one pot and putting them in the other, now that it’s no longer acceptable to be spending $80 billion on prisons.
Ban the Box campaigns are definitely a positive step. And I’ve been happy that Obama, over the past week and in recent months, has been talking about voting rights in reinstating the voting rights of formerly incarcerated people. I’d also question why people behind bars are not able to vote.
I think that when we talk about reintegration, re-entry, and we think about, well, what does it mean to be a participant in society, and thinking about the employment factors that you mentioned, thinking about how people are able to step back into this world, I think that we have to consider, well, what are we doing in the first place that is making it possible for them to enter the prison system? I think sometimes we do kind of overemphasize this idea of re-entry, and a lot of money can actually be fueled into re-entry that puts a lot of restrictions on people, that puts people in a position where they’re answering to a number of folks within the state apparatus and sort of continuing that type of confinement. So I think we have to be careful about that. I think we have to make sure to cultivate opportunities for people to really get involved.
One thing that I think we have to be careful of as we make this transition—and hopefully, fewer and fewer people will be incarcerated—is there’s a lot of talk of, “Oh, well, we’ll let them out early, and we’ll put them on electronic monitors. We’ll let them out early, and we’ll put them on house arrest”—all of these things that are still confinement, still isolation. “We’ll let them out early, but we’ll send them to a locked-down drug treatment facility or a locked-down mental health facility.” And so, we have to think sometimes about the ways that we are re-creating prison sometimes in our “transition” efforts.
the fact that we see this situation where this young black woman is pulled over for a small traffic violation, she’s thrown to the ground by police, she is severely beaten and slammed into the ground—the police, actually, actually admonished the person who is filming this horrific scene—and she’s taken to jail. And I think this demonstrates—you know, earlier, we were talking about prison reform as if it’s cut off from policing. But again, policing is the gateway to prison. And policing cannot be separated from anti-blackness. And I think this is just such a tragic and horrifying example of how that practice plays out in reality.
there are about 215,000 people in federal prison at this time, and there are around 2.3 million people incarcerated in the country as a whole. And so, a lot of those are in state prisons. Again, state prison, a lot of people convicted of violent offenses, those aren’t people that Obama is addressing when he talks about this large-scale prison reform. And then we have 750,000 people in county jails. And most of those people are incarcerated pretrial. They haven’t been convicted of anything. Most of those people who are in there pretrial are there because they can’t pay their bail. They’re there because they’re poor. And we have to remember this is also a racial justice issue, that people are given higher bails generally when they’re black.
And so, we have this many-pronged system, and addressing federal prison alone isn’t going to cut it. So even though there is kind of more of a focus being zeroed in on federal prison, particularly since the president is speaking out to a certain extent, we can’t forget that Obama can’t do everything. And actually, the community level, the activism happening at the community level, is really what’s going to make those giant shifts.
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Maya Schenwar, editor-in-chief of Truthout and author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better
— source democracynow.org