Obama Becomes the First US President to Visit Prison

For the first time, a sitting US President visited a federal prison, in order to meet the men, according to newindianexpress. He visited the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison for male offenders in Oklahoma.

He is exploring an alternative to the long conviction disproportionate to their crimes. He has asked for shortening the incarceration of non-violent drug offenders as well as reducing, or completely eliminating "severe mandatory minimum sentences".

It is worrying that such long and harsh punishments for nonviolent drug crimes have doubled the number of prisoners in two decades. About half a million people were imprisoned in 1980, which has now quadrupled to a total of 2.2 million inmates, which is "the highest rate of incarceration in the world".

Black and Latino Americans constitute 60 percent of the prison population while around 30 percent of prisoners are white, according to telegraph.

How is crime controlled and prisoners rehabilitated? The nation has to ponder these facts, he said. He actually feels a "kinship" with some of the younger convicts. He is trying to make "criminal justice reform a centerpiece of his closing months in office," he added.

"When they describe their youth and their childhood, these are young people who made mistakes that aren't that different than the mistakes I made," Obama explained.

"This is part of our effort to highlight both the challenges and opportunities we face with respect to the criminal justice system," Obama said, according to cnn.

Many young people are "doing stupid things", but they are not violent criminals, he pointed out. They could reform if they can access "resources and support structures that would allow them to survive those mistakes."

He also felt that voting rights should be restored to felons who have finished their sentences, and employers should "ban the box" that asked job applicants about their "criminal histories".

Obama is the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. His motorcade rode through fences that were "topped with multiple layers of razor wire" even as it penetrated into the prison premises.

He now wants Congress to give him legislation to solve the problem before he leaves office in 18 months, even as the amount of interest in the issue among Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates was fairly high.

The annual cost of locking up the prisoners is $80 billion, which costs the nation highly. If the prisoners could be rehabilitated, they could be "workers paying taxes, or be more involved in their children's lives, or be role models and leaders in their communities" he believed, according to dailymail.