Wouldn’t you prefer to know whether a prospective employee had a criminal background? President Obama doesn’t think you should have the right to know, at least not if you’re a government hiring manager. President Obama announced he was issuing an executive order to remove criminal history questions on government job applications saying, “It’s not too late” to break the cycles of the American justice system.
President Obama told an audience of students, lawmakers, ex-offender and radical left-wing activists Monday that, “We’ve got to make sure that people who’ve paid their debt to society can earn a second chance. We can’t have the criminal justice system carrying the entire load of society’s ills.”
Obama has issued an order to federal agencies to “ban the box” and delay asking applicants about their criminal history until later in the hiring process. Activists have for years called on an end to the question at early stages of hiring, arguing that it fosters discrimination against ex-offenders who are trying to rebuild honest lives.
Isn’t it a wise move to allow potentially violent or mentally unstable persons into positions where they might cause havoc?
Obama urged Congress to follow the example of his executive action and address what he believes is an injustice.
When hundreds of thousands of innocent unemployed persons cannot find work, why not open the doors to those that have broken the law to compete on an equal basis?
The president also said that he had expanded education grant money for ex-offenders, one of several executive actions to improve re-entry programs for former inmates who often find themselves alone and unable to find housing or work. Nearly one of three American adults has a criminal record, and a 2009 study found that 60-75% of ex-offenders were jobless up to a year after release.
Yet in Obama’s America following the law is no reason for preferential treatment.
“A lot of the time that record disqualifies you from being a full participant in our society, even if you’ve already paid your debt to society,” Obama said.
Instead of shuttling mostly black, Latino and poor people through a system of cells and poverty, Obama said repairing the criminal justice system’s many parts would help create “a virtuous cycle”.
“It means less crime, it means less recidivism, it means less money spent on incarceration,” he said, noting that more than 600,000 people are released from prison each year, and that it costs about $80bn to incarcerate more than 2.2 million inmates.
In the bizarro world in which this president lives, much like the streets of Chicago, he doesn’t think keeping criminals segregated from society is necessary. As innocent people die by the scores in the streets of his home town, it isn’t necessary to take precautions to keep evil from invading our government or schools. Even the slew of shootings by mentally unstable individuals that seems like a regular part of the nightly news, this president seems oblivious to it all.
Now had the president said that he felt those convicted of white collar crimes, drug possession or non-violent crimes, perhaps there might be a smidgeon of logic to his decision. No, even drug dealers get a pass with Mr. Obama.
“Instead of peddling drugs that are destroying lives, he’s saving lives,” Obama said.
Sure, who wouldn’t want someone with a pension for selling drugs to work for, say, the TSA?
While we live in a world of his creation, where the job participation rate is the lowest since the Carter days, Mr. Obama is most concerned about giving criminal re-entry programs more attention and finding increased funding to focus more on life after prison.
Representative Elijah Cummings, a Democrat behind a bill to lower or eradicate minimum criminal sentences, praised Obama’s actions. The president’s steps would help “to reduce recidivism, break generational cycles of crime, and make our communities safer”, Cummings said.
The president, who is quick to blame police in nearly every instance, has for months toured the nation in a loose campaign for criminal sentencing reform.
Obama’s speech followed a weekend during which about 6,000 drug offenders were granted early releases thanks to policy changes by his US Sentencing Commission, which made the revisions retroactive to last year.
Republican senators have proven amenable to reasonable reform bills, but Obama’s opponents on the national stage have seized it as an opportunity to criticize him. Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor and a presidential candidate, has accused the president of not supporting police, saying in September that “lawlessness has been the rule of the day” under Obama.
