Will President Barack Obama Take On Prison Reform?

(Aug. 2) -- The Obama administration has inherited two major wars and busied itself on the domestic front with health care reform and righting the economy. But while Congress last week passed a law to shrink the disparity in jail sentences for those caught with crack cocaine, the administration has yet to tackle the more systemic problems of the nation's criminal justice system.

The Economist magazine recently examined America's criminal justice system, painting a gloomy picture (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan):

Between 2.3m and 2.4m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole or probation are included, one adult in 31 is under "correctional" supervision. As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan. Overcrowding is the norm. Federal prisons house 60% more inmates than they were designed for. State lock-ups are only slightly less stuffed.

This surfeit of prisoners can be explained by several factors. With politicians running and winning on hard-on-crime platforms, sentencing has become harsher, abetted by mandatory requirements that take away judges' use of discretion. Some states even lock up nonviolent habitual criminals for life. The Economist identifies one, Jerald Sanders, who was sentenced to a life term in Alabama after stealing a bicycle.

The so-called war on drugs is another contributor. "The number of drug offenders in federal and state lock-ups has increased 13-fold since 1980," reports the Economist. This despite conflicting evidence as to whether the threat of prison -- or even a stint in jail -- deters would-be criminals from breaking the law.

Meanwhile, prisons cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars per inmate each year, from an average cost of $18,000 per prisoner in Mississippi to $50,000 in California.

Many prison reform activists argue that the justice system should focus more on rehabilitation efforts and reduce penalties for nonviolent, victimless crimes, such as possessing small amounts of drugs. (The drug war has resulted in widespread racial injustice: "Although there is little evidence that blacks are more likely to use drugs than whites, they are six times more likely to be imprisoned on drug-related charges," reports Helen Epstein in The New York Review of Books.) Most reform activists also say it's necessary to address broader societal problems -- such as lack of education and poverty -- to reduce crime.

It's a thorny issue, and last week the House took a second stab at it with a voice vote that would create a bipartisan national commission to review the U.S. criminal justice system. (The bill follows an earlier Senate version that has yet to come to the floor for a vote.) So far, Obama reportedly has offered "quiet encouragement," but has yet to put the full force of the White House behind the effort.

Read more at The Economist.

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