Obama Visits Federal Prison in Oklahoma

President Barack Obama became the first sitting president to tour a prison when he visited the El Reno federal correction center in Oklahoma July 16.

Reuters reports that in remarks to prisoners at the facility Obama said that he could have very well ended up like them if he was not born into a position of relative privilege. The president has admitted to experimenting with marijuana and cocaine in his youth, and used the visit to the prison to call for prison reform, particularly for non-violent drug offenders.

The United States has the largest prison population on the planet, despite the fact that countries like India and China have more than 1 billion citizens. The United States has 25 percent of the world's prison population despite being home to only 5 percent of the world's population overall.

Obama has previously made headlines for pardoning people that were given life sentences for non-violent drug crimes. By the end of 2013, there were more than 1.5 million people in US prisons.  

A major factor in the large U.S. prison population is the practice of mandatory minimums, which are laws where a person must be given a sentence of a certain amount of time for a crime, regardless of the facts of a particular case.

Obama has challenged Congress to pass criminal justice reform by the end of this year. It has a decent chance of passing, as Congress has previously moved to reduce the disparities given to people for distributing crack and cocaine. People who were caught selling crack could face higher penalties than cocaine, despite the fact they are basically the same drug.

Obama also sat down for conversations with some of the inmates, and those discussions will be aired on HBO at a later date.