It added that Obama was encouraged that Congress was considering a measure to “ban the box” for criminal histories for hiring by federal agencies and contractors, following the lead of a few cities, states and private companies.
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With more than 2 million people in federal, state and local lockups, revamping the criminal justice system two decades after the tough-on-crime movement of the 1980s and 1990s has become an area of bipartisan consensus. So, consider this. There are roughly 215,000 inmates in the federal prison system.
According to the White House, President Obama plans to announce actions that include access to education grants, an arrest guidance for public and assisted housing, job training and other initiatives. “Nearly one in three Americans of working age”, he said.
Over the weekend, more than 6,000 federal prisoners were freed after the U.S. Sentencing Commission adjusted sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.
Obama said America would be stronger if it allowed criminals emerging from prison to find paying jobs, but employers often dismiss them early in the hiring process if they answer honestly by checking the box that says they’ve been convicted of a crime.
Washington, D.C., and 19 states – California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia – already have the so-called ban the box laws on the books regarding public employment.
The president said he will ask the government personnel office to wait until later in the hiring process to ask about criminal histories.
“We applaud all the steps Obama is taking to try to ease re-entry of people back into society”, Mujahid Farid, director of the NYC-based organization Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), told RH Reality Check.
On the House side, Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, has introduced a companion sentencing overhaul bill supported by John Conyers of Michigan, the panel’s top Democrat. In recent months he has touted community policing work in Camden, New Jersey, visited a federal prison in Oklahoma and traveled to West Virginia to talk about the rise in heroin abuse. No longer bound by union contracts, the department has emphasized community policing.
During remarks Monday at Rutgers University in Newark, the president stressed that fighting crime, and making people pay for their crimes, remains paramount, but that criminal justice reforms he envisions are “also about giving people a foundation through which they might become productive citizens”. Christie, who is struggling to attract attention for his presidential campaign, began the morning criticizing Obama in television interviews for coming to his state to “take credit for something he has nothing to do with”.
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“He’s going past the normal pardon process and just letting these folks out”, Christie said.
