This is not the first time the President has spoken out about the American criminal justice system.
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The so-called “drop the box” initiative would allow prospective employees not to check a box on a few federal applications that acknowledges a criminal record. The goal is not to have the person immediately eliminated from employment opportunities based on that one question.
With more than 2 million people in federal, state, and local prisons, revamping the criminal justice system two decades after the tough-on-crime movement of the 1980s and 1990s has become one of the rare areas of bipartisan consensus lately.
Along with banning the bias against hiring and housing of former prison inmates, the president also discussed how “giving former prisoners a second chance in life is the right thing to do”. Does he stand up for law enforcement?
But New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is failing to gain traction in his bid for the Republican Party’s nomination to run for the White House in the November 2016 election, said Obama’s policies had hurt police departments nationwide.
Criminal justice advocates scored a big win yesterday with President Obama’s announcement of new measures aimed at easing reintegration of returning citizens-individuals released from state and federal prisons-who number more than 600,000 annually.
“They’re not surprising for somebody whose poll numbers are closer to an asterisk than they are double digits”, Earnest said.
Obama is scheduled on Monday to travel to New Jersey and New York to talk about criminal justice reform. “Treatment works. And it takes a whole community to help people re-enter society and to overcome their addiction to drugs”, he said.
President Barack Obama has just done something spectacular to help the formerly incarnated.
The federal government will no longer ask job applicants about their criminal record in an attempt to curb hiring and housing bias against ex-cons. Obama has used 15 similar orders during his presidency to force companies doing business with the government to raise the minimum wage, adopt non-discrimination policies and grant workers paid time off.
“You know, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, the president’s appointed Federal Bureau of Investigation director has said this week that because of a lack of support from politicians like the president of the United States, that police officers are afraid to get out of their cars; that they’re afraid to enforce the law”.
The criminal justice reform push has attracted diverse coalition of supporters, which spans the ideological spectrum from the conservative Koch Industries to the liberal Center for American Progress.
Speaking after the Rutgers-Newark event, Obama said he’d been inspired by the stories of former convicts and drug addicts working to turn their lives around and by the communities of supporters, many of them working within federally funded programs, who are helping them.
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“Just seeing a lot of the people who work here were prior clients themselves gave me hope”, she said.
