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The Social Order
In July 2015, President Obama paid a press-saturated visit to a federal penitentiary in Oklahoma. The cell blocks that Obama toured had been evacuated in anticipation of his arrival, but after talking to six carefully prescreened inmates, he drew some conclusions about the path to prison. “These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made,” the president told the waiting reporters.
The
New York Times seconded this observation in its front-page coverage of Obama’s prison excursion. There is but a “fine line between president and prisoner,” the paper noted. Anyone who “smoked marijuana and tried cocaine,” as the president had as a young man, could end up in the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution, according to the
Most others have statutes allowing medical marijuana.
And every one of them conflicts with the federal Controlled Substances Act.
The act defines marijuana as a dangerous drug with no medical value. Under an illusion of sovereignty, states that legalize cannabis are, in effect, licensing people and businesses to technically commit federal felonies.
Clearly, this is a movement, not just a moment.
We are members of a task force convened by the Council on Criminal Justice to create a roadmap for federal action toward a fairer and more effective justice system. One issue that quickly drew our attention is this untenable conflict between state and federal marijuana laws.
Why American Exceptionalism Abroad Requires Criminal Justice Reform
On the surface, national security and criminal justice policy may seem to be otherwise unrelated, but in fact, some of the major foreign policy lessons Americans have learned apply in great measure to justice reform.
Foreign policy scholars debate the concept of American exceptionalism, but with more than 20 percent of the world’s prisoners and only five percent of the world’s population, the United States has long been without doubt the exception on criminal justice. Being so out of step with other developed democracies has undermined our standing and moral leadership in the world.
Why American Exceptionalism Abroad Requires Criminal Justice Reform
The title of this post is the headline of this notable new commentary authored by Marc Levin published in
The National Interest. Here are excerpts:
Beyond eroding U.S. credibility as a beacon of human rights, diminishing confidence in America’s justice system, stemming in part from persistent racial disparities, threatens the unity that undergirds our fiscal strength as well. Racial tensions drain U.S. economic vitality, and, considering that 43 percent of military members are racial or ethnic minorities, the dangers of white supremacy and the efforts to delegitimize our democracy and justice system are far from merely theoretical.