Ken Berwitz
In July 2015,President Obama paid a press-saturated visit to a federal penitentiary inOklahoma. The cell blocks that Obama toured had been evacuated in anticipationof his arrival, but after talking to six carefully prescreened inmates, he drewsome conclusions about the path to prison. “These are young people who mademistakes that aren\’t that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakesthat a lot of you guys made,” the president told the waiting reporters.
The New YorkTimes seconded this observation in its front-page coverage of Obama’sprison excursion. There is but a “fine line between president and prisoner,” the paper noted. Anyone who “smoked marijuana and tried cocaine,” as the presidenthad as a young man, could end up in the El Reno Federal CorrectionalInstitution, according to the Times.
This conceit waspreposterous. It takes a lot more than marijuana or cocaine use to end up infederal prison. But the truth didn\’t matter. Obama\’s prison tour came in themidst of the biggest delegitimation of law enforcement in recent memory.Activists, politicians, and the media have spent the last year broadcasting adaily message that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks andinsanely draconian. The immediate trigger for that movement, known as BlackLives Matter, has been a series of highly publicized deaths of black males atthe hands of the police. But the movement also builds on a long-standingdiscourse from the academic Left about “mass incarceration,” policing, andrace.
There may be goodreasons for radically reducing the prison census and the enforcement ofcriminal laws. But so far, the arguments advanced in favor of that agenda havebeen as deceptive as the claim that prisons are filled with casual drug users.It is worth examining the gap between the reality of law enforcement and thecurrent campaign against it, since policy based on fiction is unlikely to yieldpositive results.
