Presidencies can exert substantial influence over the
direction of the U.S. criminal justice system. Those privileged to serve as
President and in senior roles in the executive branch have an obligation to use
that influence to enhance the fairness and effectiveness of the justice system
at all phases.
How we treat citizens who make mistakes (even serious
mistakes), pay their debt to society, and deserve a second chance reflects who
we are as a people and reveals a lot about our character and commitment to our
founding principles. And how we police our communities and the kinds of
problems we ask our criminal justice system to solve can have a profound impact
on the extent of trust in law enforcement and significant implications for
public safety.
Criminal justice reform has been a focus of my entire
career — even since before my time at the Harvard Law Review. As a community
organizer, I saw firsthand how our criminal justice system exacerbates inequality.
It takes young people who made mistakes no worse than my own and traps them in
an endless cycle of marginalization and punishment.
More than twenty years ago, I wrote about my
experience in neighborhoods where “prison records had been passed down from father
to son for more than a generation.”
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