Tag: Obama

Life sentence is “slow death penalty”

The Guardian has published a detailed account of a case in the queue awaiting consideration by the President for commutation of sentence.  Ray Bennett was convicted in 1991 of acting as a courier for a crack cocaine distributor, and sentenced to life in prison based on two prior state misdemeanors.  “The judge who sentenced Bennett did his duty reluctantly, saying the drug runners were ‘just country folks’ and not the major traffickers that Congress likely had in mind.” Bennett has now served more than 24 years in prison, has an exemplary record of conduct while incarcerated, and has long since conquered the addiction to drugs that led to his conviction.  His clemency application was filed with the Pardon Attorney through Clemency Project 2014 in early April.  We reprint substantial portions of the Guardian article to show the kinds of cases that may be acted on by the President in coming months. Drug inmate left off Obama’s clemency list: life sentence is “slow death penalty” by Alan Yuhas For two years in the late 1980s, a young addict drove between Florida and Georgia ferrying crack cocaine and cash in a liquor bag. During the next two decades, his brothers and sisters raised families without him, his wife divorced him and died, and he was barred from attending his mother’s funeral less than 50 miles away. Ray Bennett, now 59 and decades sober, will die in prison as sentenced 24 years ago – unless, as he hopes, he receives the same clemency that Barack Obama issued last week for 46 prisoners with similar cases. Bennett was disappointed not to be on Obama’s list of inmates whose prison sentences were cut short, his sister Edna Thornton, 81, told the Guardian after speaking to the inmate on Sunday. “But he said, ‘I’m not giving up,’ and somehow he has never been bitter or angry. “He always felt that if he did the crime he could do the time. He just never dreamed it would be life without parole.” As his sister put it, Bennett “got caught up” in a five-man drug ring run by an old friend, John Hansley, to pay for his addiction to crack. He had two prior drug convictions: one in 1980 for having 12 tablets of diazepam, and one in 1988 for possession of crack cocaine. After police seized him and almost 300 grams of crack cocaine at a bus station in 1990, a prosecutor pressed enhanced charges based on his prior convictions. Bennett was found guilty at a jury trial – he refused to testify against Hansley, writing that he felt “a moral obligation” to him. “A friend since I was a young boy [I] did not want to say anything that would hurt him.” Because he declined to cooperate, the prosecutor added the enhanced sentencing, according to Bennett and his attorney. Under the law, the mandatory minimum sentence was life. “A life sentence is tantamount to a death sentence,” Bennett wrote the president in his petition for clemency. “It is the slow death penalty. “I’ve seen those around me lose hope and commit suicide. I never knew that such levels of despair and despondency existed in our nation. I never knew a nation this great could treat its people so inhumanely.” Three of Bennett’s co-defendants have already walked free from prison. The fourth, Hansley, is scheduled for release in 2017. “Ray’s case illustrates the heart of the problem,” said Bennett’s lawyer Margaret Love, who previously reviewed pardon applications for the White House as the US pardons attorney. “It exemplifies one of the most serious problems of the mandatory minimum regime, leveraging guilty pleas by threatening enhancements.” Love contrasted the modern system to that of the 1960s, when Lyndon B Johnson granted clemency to hundreds – years before Richard Nixon declared war on drugs and the US prison population quadrupled to the 2.2 million incarcerated today. “The president cannot hope to do more than a few of these clemency cases,” Love said. “He’s doing the best that he can, but clemency was never supposed to be used in this systemic fashion.” The problems, however, are systemic, according to reform advocates. Long mandatory minimum sentences for drug violations, especially repeated minor convictions, have left thousands of low-level, nonviolent offenders imprisoned for decades to life. Lawmakers passed one reform in 2010 that narrowed a racially disparate difference between crack cocaine and powder cocaine sentences. If Bennett were sentenced today under the new law, he likely would not receive a life sentence. And as part of last week’s criminal justice push, Obama urged Congress to pass bipartisan sentencing reform bills that would go much further to roll back mandatory minimum sentences, saying that in “far too many cases, the punishment simply does not fit the crime”. But prisoners who have already been sentenced rarely find relief. Only a fraction of the tens of thousands who apply receive clemency or a pardon, leading some activists to compare the system to a lottery. “Clemency can mitigate the effects of mandatory minimums, but really only Congress can change it,” said Jeremy Haile, federal advocacy counsel for the Sentencing Project, a reform organization. “They enacted the laws at a time when there was a lot of hysteria about drug abuse, the war on drugs. It just became very punitive. “The president should continue to say there are too many people incarcerated in too many prisons, for too long, for no good public safety reason.” Even judges have publicly denounced the rules. The judge who sentenced Bennett did his duty reluctantly, saying the drug runners were “just country folks” and not the major traffickers that Congress likely had in mind. More than 20 years later, at least two federal judges continue to wage public campaigns against the terms. A handful of Republicans and Democrats, including Texas senator John Cornyn and New Jersey’s Cory Booker, hope to pass a bill in Congress this year addressing the issue. “Justice is dispensed on an individual basis and you can’t do it on an assembly line,” Cornyn said last week. Defenders of minimum mandatory sentences argue that they bring order to inconsistent courts and can convince suspects to provide testimony. “We’ve created a caste system in this country that disproportionately affects minorities,” Booker said, noting that black children are particularly likely to grow up with incarcerated relatives. “For many communities it’s a matter of life and death, a matter of having the American dream or being denied it.” Bennett and his relatives, who are black, also described the pain of prolonged separation. “I will never forget being told by my unit staff that, due to my life sentence, I would not be allowed to attend my own mother’s funeral,” Bennett wrote. “This prison robbed me of closure. A funeral is for letting go, but I have not been able to do that.” Given their age difference, Thornton said she thinks of Bennett as more of a son than a brother. She and 10 other relatives – siblings, nieces and nephews – wrote letters to the president pleading for Bennett’s release. Visits to Jesup Correctional always left family looking “so sad and broken”, wrote one niece. “Ironically, he ends up encouraging me more than I encourage him.” Although the president can issue executive orders or guidelines to help former inmates find work or housing, Obama can do little beyond offering clemency or pardons for the federally incarcerated. Love argues that the Justice Department should use a law that permits it to take cases with “extraordinary and compelling” circumstances back to court for sentence reductions. The law is almost exclusively used for cases of terminal illness, but Love says the phrase could apply to broader cases. She also suggests the president should rely on the Bureau of Prisons to recommend prisoners for clemency: “Who knows better than them who can hold a steady job, who’s reliable, who’s not going to cause trouble?” Last year, the Justice Department invited prisoners to apply for clemency, but found itself struggling with the deluge of applications. Since 2009, the attorneys at the Justice Department’s pardon office have received more than 30,000 applications, each a hefty sheaf of facts, claims, counterclaims and technicalities. The administration then recruited outside lawyers to help pro bono, under a coalition called the Clemency Project 2014, but the effort appears to have slowed under the work. Bennett’s application remains somewhere in the application stack, the recommendations of family and prison supervisors – he works in the tool room and as a counselor – filed away. “We know that what he did was wrong,” Thornton said. “We just feel that the punishment doesn’t fit. He has made amends and we believe that he would do well on the outside. I do think he will get out,” Thornton said. Read more

Clemency is Not the Answer (Updated)

This piece was originally published in The Crime Report on July 13, and republished in revised form on July 16. On Monday President Obama announced in a video address that he had commuted the sentences of 46 people sentenced to long prison terms for drug offenses.  His counsel, Neil Eggleston, stated that “While I expect the President will issue additional commutations and pardons before the end of his term, it is important to recognize that clemency alone will not fix decades of overly punitive sentencing policies.“ Mr. Eggleston added that “the President is committed to using all the tools at his disposal to remedy unfairness in our criminal justice system.” However, judging from his speech to the NAACP the next day, clemency is the only one of those tools that is calculated to result in any more prison releases. The President has now issued 89 commutations, the most since Lyndon Johnson.  But even if the President ends up granting triple that number or more, it will hardly make a dent in the number of those in prison potentially eligible for relief under the announced standards of the Administration’s clemency initiative.   As Douglas Berman observed recently in his Sentencing Law and Policy blog, if the President one week were to commute as many as 80 federal drug prisoners, “this would still not be as substantively consequential for the federal prison population as the 400-plus drug defendants who will be sentenced to lengthy federal prison terms the very same week!” Meanwhile, the system for administering the clemency initiative is reportedly having difficulty gaining traction.  On July 4, the New York Times reported in a front page story that more than 30,000 federal prisoners have filed applications for commutation of sentence with Clemency Project 2014, the consortium of private organizations formed last year to assist the Justice Department in identifying worthy cases, but that a “cumbersome review process” has allowed only “a small fraction” of them to reach the President’s desk. A press release issued by Clemency Project 2014 shortly after the grants were announced conceded that only four of the 46 cases had been submitted under its auspices, and a review of the recipients of clemency reveals that several did not satisfy the Justice Department’s declared eligibility requirement of ten years already spent in prison.  Some prisoners have now expressed concern that perhaps the blessing of this Project was not the “fast track” to relief they had imagined. There is a growing sense of urgency among those who are responsible for organizing the clemency effort, in the Department of Justice and in the private bar.  In a recent training of volunteer counsel representing clemency applicants, Pardon Attorney Deborah Leff urged them not to delay in getting their clients’ petitions filed. “If there is one message I want you to take away today, it’s this: Sooner is better,” Leff said. Some federal public defender offices have been urged by Clemency Project 2014 to identify worthy applicants from among their client base and submit petitions for them prior to January 20, 2017, since it may take as much as a year for the Administration to review them. But even with the extraordinary resources that have been devoted to identifying prisoners who meet the Justice Department’s eligibility criteria, it seems unlikely that this task can be given more than a lick and a promise before the clock runs out on President Obama’s term. It is not clear if it was the Administration’s original intention to try to reach all deserving cases through clemency, but that goal seems chimerical.  It must now be conceded that a large percentage of the applications that have been filed, whether with Clemency Project 2014 or directly with the Pardon Attorney, will not have even been looked at by the end of this President’s term. Looking back on the 18 months since the clemency initiative was launched, what have we learned? For starters, we’ve learned that the problem of unjust sentences is simply too large and too pervasive to deal with through the clemency mechanism.  When Lyndon Johnson commuted 200 drug sentences in the 1960s, almost everyone then in prison who deserved relief got it, thanks to the staffing efforts of the Bureau of Prisons.  Today, given the massive number of people prosecuted for federal drug crimes in the past 25 years and the fundamental rethinking of federal drug sentences now underway, potentially deserving prisoners are legion. Between 1990 and 2007, nearly 10,000 people were sentenced to prison terms of 30 years or more for crimes involving drugs or firearms.  Twice that number received sentences of at least 20 years.  Trying to produce useful and reliable advice for the President about more than a token number of these individuals is too great a burden for the Justice Department’s tiny pardon staff. But the President cannot be expected to put his reputation on the line on the basis of anything less. In addition to the practical problems raised by trying to force so many prisoner petitions through an administrative bottleneck onto a busy President’s plate, there are institutional reasons why executive clemency is the wrong tool for dealing with systemic problems in the penal system.  Even if a more efficient way of administering the pardon power could have been devised (say, the high-level clemency commission that some states use), this would not have fully put to rest the perennial suspicion the public has about pardoning.   As I wrote shortly after the final Clinton pardons, “as a practical matter [the pardon power] cannot be exercised except pursuant to a process that is perceived as accessible and fair.” As far as substantive fairness is concerned, that has never been expected of clemency.  On the other hand, the diversity within the group of 46 grantees just in terms of length of time in prison has raised questions among prisoners and their lawyers about the fairness of the Justice Department’s method of selection, and about why more of those proposed for relief by Clemency Project 2014 were not chosen. Now that clemency has been harnessed to deal with a system-wide problem involving thousands of potentially eligible individuals, many expect greater attention to a justice-based model of fairness. The words “random” and “lottery” that had temporarily disappeared from conversations about clemency began to surface as soon as the grants were announced. Other institutional concerns are raised by too great a reliance on clemency to deal with a systemic problem in the legal system: this disrespects both the key role played by courts in determining the quantum of punishment under federal sentencing policies, and the legitimate concerns of Congress for the rule of law. Finally, there are philosophical as well as institutional and practical reasons why our justice system is built upon accountable judicial decision-making under statutory authority, and not upon the unstructured and unexplained discretion of a president exercising a plenary constitutional power.  With all due respect to Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 74, most scholars today subscribe to the vision of Enlightenment philosopher Cesare Beccaria, who proposed in 1764 that “Clemency is a virtue which belongs to the legislator, and not to the executor of the laws; a virtue which ought to shine in the code, and not in private judgment.” (Hamilton might have agreed with Beccaria had he not had such a bad experience with the Continental Congress and such a good one with his mentor George Washington.) Perhaps the most that can be hoped for from the Obama clemency initiative is that it will shine a light on excessive federal prison sentences as a pressing problem of justice, extend mercy to a few fortunate individuals, and signal the need for a more systematic approach. In a word, if clemency is not the entire answer to the systemic problem of excessive sentences, it can still serve its time-honored function of pointing the way to a resolution through the legal system. Looking ahead to the likely denouement of its clemency initiative with only a few hundred token grants, the Obama Administration ought to be exploring ways it can bring cases back to court for the relief so many deserve.  Thankfully, this will not require new legislation or new funds, since there is already on the books a judicial sentence reduction authority that could easily be used. Specifically, 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A)(i) provides that a court may at any time reduce a sentence upon motion of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) for “extraordinary and compelling reasons.” The Sentencing Commission is authorized under 28 U.S.C. § 994(t) to establish policy for courts considering BOP motions under § 3582(c)(1)(A)(i), which it has done under USSG ¶ 1B1.13. Under this policy guideline, “extraordinary and compelling reasons” that may justify sentence reduction include illness, disability, old age, exigent family circumstances, and any other reason that the Justice Department may determine falls within that category. It is noteworthy that several of the organizations currently participating in the clemency initiative, including the American Bar Association, are on record with the Sentencing Commission as favoring a more expansive menu of “extraordinary and compelling reasons” warranting sentence reduction, including one that now seems prescient: “The defendant would have received a significantly lower sentence under a subsequent change in applicable law that has not been made retroactive.” Less than two years ago, BOP issued a new policy statement with a list of circumstances in which it may seek a sentence reduction, a list that is evidently not intended to be exhaustive.  Accordingly, there is no reason why BOP could not determine that “extraordinary and compelling reasons” exist in any case meeting the criteria set forth by Administration as warranting a grant of clemency. The coincidence of the standards in the two contexts would be particularly fitting in light of the fact that the judicial sentence reduction authority in § 3582(c)(1)(A)(i) was originally enacted in 1976, at the Justice Department’s instance, to expedite sentence reductions that previously had required a clemency application to be submitted to the President.   All it would take to make this happen would be a resolve on the part of the Department to use this statute for the purpose it was originally intended. Augmenting the Administration’s clemency initiative through broader use of a judicial sentence reduction mechanism, which the Justice Department’s own Inspector General has repeatedly criticized as underutilized (most recently for aging prisoners), would put sentence reduction on a sounder long-term footing that is more consistent with the principles of determinate sentencing, be more predictable and accountable as a practical matter, and respond to any concerns about the unaccountable use of executive power. And, because a large scale sentence reduction program is already underway in the federal courts, economies of scale would be possible. Many years ago, when I was serving as Pardon Attorney, then-Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann asked me why we should ask the President to commute the sentence of an elderly prisoner when (he said) “we can do the job ourselves.” Now I would ask the current Deputy Attorney General the same question.   NOTE: On August 7, the United States Sentencing Commission announced its decision to make possible amendments to USSG § 1B1.13, the guideline for courts considering motions for sentence reduction filed under 18 USC § 3582(c)(1)(A)(i), a priority for the 2016 amendment cycle.  The Practitioners’ Advisory Group is expected to urge the Commission to expand the guideline to reach cases that would ordinarily be considered for clemency relief, including those of prisoners who would have received a less severe sentence under current law.      Read more

President declares U.S. a “nation of second chances” but issues no pardons

In commuting the sentences of 46 individuals serving long drug sentences, President Obama declared that America is a “nation of second chances” in a video address posted on the White House website.  But that sunny optimism about our country’s willingness to forgive hasn’t led him to grant very many pardons, the relief whose purpose is to restore rights and status to those who have fully served their sentences, to give them a second chance at first class citizenship.  Indeed, as Michael Isikoff reported the same day the commutations were issued, Obama’s 64 pardons are the fewest issued by any full-term president since John Adams.  Indeed, the President has commuted more in the past six months than he has pardoned in his entire time in office. The President’s determination to reduce unjustly lengthy prison sentences is commendable and historically significant.  But it need and should not lead him to the neglect the other part of the clemency caseload, the petitions filed by individuals who have led exemplary lives for many years but are still burdened by severe collateral consequences and the stigma of conviction. Unfortunately those petitions appear to have have been shunted to the back burner in the excitement of the so-called “clemency initiative.” As exemplified by the case of Sala Udin described in Isikoff’s article, deserving pardon applicants have seen their petitions languish for years in the Office of the Pardon Attorney. These days pardon investigations are not progressing past the intake stage, and it is very hard to find out what the hold-up is.  It is tempting to fault the Justice Department for the glacial pace of pardoning, but in truth it is the President’s agenda that controls. A presidential pardon is the only relief from collateral consequences available to those convicted of federal offenses.  Expungement is not authorized by any federal statute, and most federal courts have held that they have no inherent authority to issue this kind of relief.  A more definitive answer to that question may come with the government’s appeal of Judge John Gleeson’s recent expungement order. But until that legal question is settled, and legislation either enacted or found unnecessary, we must hope that the President will expand his view of “second chances” beyond the prison gates to the communities where those who are burdened by a criminal record live and work.   Read more

“Poised to commute dozens of sentences, Obama remains the ‘Scrooge’ of pardons”

Yahoo News has published a piece by its chief investigative reporter Michael Isikoff commenting on how few pardons President Obama has granted, and how backed up the Justice Department’s pardon office seems to be.  He illustrates the problem of presidential inaction with the case of Sala Udin, a Pittsburgh community activist and former City Council member, whose application for pardon of a 1970 firearms conviction has been awaiting decision for several years. Isikoff reports that while the President is likely to issue a number of sentence commutations this week, no pardons will be forthcoming. This leaves the 800 people whose pardon applications are pending in the Justice Department wondering whether there is hope for forgiveness during this president’s term. What does it take to get a pardon from President Obama? It’s a question Sala Udin, a former Pittsburgh City Council member and onetime civil rights Freedom Rider, is asking a lot this summer, more than three years after he first asked a president he deeply admires to grant him a pardon for a 44-year-old federal firearms conviction. “It’s downright depressing,” says Udin, 72. “I don’t know whether [my application] has gotten lost in the back of the file, but I haven’t heard anything. It’s very frustrating.” The White House is planning to announce this week that Obama has commuted the sentences of more than 40 nonviolent offenders, a move that officials say illustrates his commitment to criminal justice reform. But this week’s announcement, sources tell Yahoo News, is unlikely to include any actual pardons of petitioners like Udin, one of the more than 800 people whose applications for presidential mercy are stacked up at the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney. That would extend a record of parsimony on pardons that critics say is one of the paradoxes of Obama’s presidency: Obama, who has spoken with eloquence about grace and redemption, has granted fewer pardons (43) than any president since James Garfield (who died from an assassin’s bullet in 1881 barely six months after he had been sworn in). “He’s been unusually stingy — he’s a clemency Grinch,” says Douglas Berman, an Ohio State law professor who has studied presidential pardons. Obama’s reluctance to use his constitutional power to pardon to some extent reflects his determination to avoid controversies, such as the uproar that followed Bill Clinton’s pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich on his last day in office, critics and current and former officials say. Even the relatively few pardons Obama has granted — such as one for an aging bootlegger and another for a man convicted of mutilating coins in the early 1960s — have been largely trivial, and missed opportunities to correct past injustices or excesses in the criminal justice system, his critics say. “It’s just not something that he’s interested in,” says P.S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor who writes a blog, Pardon Power, and ranks Obama as “the seventh least merciful” president in history. Obama, for his part, has blamed the Office of Pardon Attorney, whose chief, Ronald Rodgers, resigned last year amid disclosures that he had misrepresented a commutation applicant’s record to the White House. (The relatively small office — with about seven lawyers — that reviews all pardon and commutation applications is now headed by a former journalist, Deborah Leff.) “I noticed that what I was getting [from the Pardon Office] was mostly small-time crimes from very long ago,” Obama said in an interview with the Huffington Post last March, in which he vowed to move “more aggressively” on petitions during his remaining time in office. Sources have also told Yahoo News’ Liz Goodwin that the president complained that the pardon attorney’s office was sending him petitions from wealthy and connected applicants, who typically wanted a pardon so that they could get a hunting license. Whatever the reasons for past inaction, it has been little comfort so far to Udin, whose lawyer, Margaret Love (the former chief of the Justice Department’s pardon office), calls him a “poster child” for a pardon. In his youth, Udin (who changed his name from Samuel Howze) was a Freedom Rider for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who braved racist cops while registering black voters in the Mississippi Delta. “I was beaten up pretty bad and thought I was going to die,” said Udin, recalling an incident in which he was pulled over and ordered to “get out of the car, n—–!” In 1970, while driving back from Mississippi, Udin was stopped for speeding outside Louisville and an unloaded rifle was found in the trunk of his car, resulting in his conviction for interstate commerce of firearms and his incarceration for eight months in federal prison. Udin doesn’t dispute his guilt, but he offered an explanation in his application to the Justice Department: “At that point, although I was previously committed to nonviolence, I concluded that if I was trapped on some lonely, dark road in the South and confronted by Klansmen who threatened to kill me, I would be prepared to defend my life,” he wrote in his petition. “I concluded that I would rather be caught by the police with defensive weapons than to be caught by the Klan without them.” Udin had had a few other earlier minor brushes with the law — including state convictions for having an unregistered handgun in his car in Pittsburgh and receiving stolen property, both of which were wiped clean by a pardon from then Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell in 2007. But following his convictions more than four decades ago, Udin made what Pennsyvlania Sen. Bob Casey called (in a letter to Obama last year endorsing his petition) “extraordinary contributions to the community.” He founded an African-American Culture Center in Pittsburgh, headed up a national leadership institute, and served three terms on the Pittsburgh City Council (from 1995 to 2006), spearheading the creation of the city’s police civilian review board. Udin acknowledges one possible obstacle in his petition: In 2007, he campaigned for Obama and made a $500 contribution to his campaign. Could the White House be reluctant to endorse Udin’s pardon petition for fear it would look like a political favor for a past supporter? “I don’t want to say or do anything that would cause a problem for President Obama,” Udin said. “I love him. If that’s the reason, I’ll accept it. I just don’t want it to be for any other reason.” The White House wouldn’t comment on Udin’s (or any other) case, nor would the Justice Department say whether his application has even made it to the president’s desk. But a White House spokeswoman, when asked about the president’s record on pardons generally, said, “The president’s term isn’t over yet,” adding in an email: “The president believes strongly that the ability to petition for clemency is a critical component of our criminal justice system. He looks forward to reviewing additional requests for clemency in the coming months.” Read more

Glenn Martin’s “prison-like” White House experience

The Crime Report published this report about Glenn Martin’s recent experience as an invited guest at the White House, described in Glenn’s open letter to the President, giving further details of the treatment he received and describing the Administration’s response. Glenn Martin’s “prison-like” White House experience July 2, 2015 09:01:56 am https://apis.google.com/_/scs/apps-static/_/js/k=oz.gapi.en.RArmLpCIYB0.O/m=auth/exm=plusone/rt=j/sv=1/d=1/ed=1/am=UQ/rs=AGLTcCNdsHwKwytm_BdBPIfRKL9FK1gKdQ/t=zcms/cb=gapi.loaded_1 By Graham Kates Two weeks after criminal justice advocate Glenn Martin was nearly denied access to a White House event he was invited to, he’s still waiting for an explanation. In a widely distributed “open letter” to President Barack Obama last week, Martin revealed that he was required to have a special escort in order to enter the White House complex for a discussion with senior officials on breaking down barriers facing ex-prisoners. Martin, who is one of the country’s leading advocates for ending those barriers, is an ex-inmate himself. Now head of JustLeadershipUSA, he served time for a robbery conviction 20 years ago—and has since achieved national prominence for his work with former prisoners. Although he was invited to the meeting, along with a select group of advocates, scholars, elected officials and law enforcement authorities, he was treated as a security risk. “The staggering symbolism of the ordeal was not lost on me, Mr. President,” Martin wrote in the June 25 letter to Obama and Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy. “In a country where 65 million people have a criminal record on file, being selectively barred from entering the White House for a discussion about those very same people was as insulting as it was indicative of the broader problem.” The White House declined to comment on Martin’s treatment, but a spokesperson pointed to the creation of the Federal Interagency Reentry Council — a Department of Justice initiative focused on prisoner reentry policy established in 2011 — and other reform efforts, such as inviting formerly incarcerated individuals like Martin to the White House.The Secret Service also declined to comment on Martin’s visit. However, spokesperson Robert Hoback briefly described White House security protocol in an emailed statement. “Every visitor to the White House Complex undergoes a comprehensive security check prior to the scheduled visit,” Hoback wrote. “There are many considerations taken into account in making a final determination before allowing an individual access to the White House Complex.” For Martin, the incident underlines the obstacles facing former inmates. In fact, he said used the incident in his White House discussions that day “to frame the topic for larger criminal justice reform.” But the incident still frustrates Martin. He said in an interview Wednesday that he had waited years for the chance to meet with White House advisors about criminal justice reform, only to undergo an experience he described as “humiliating.” When he and his companions arrived at the White House’s Eisenhower Executive Office Building on June 17 to discuss the issues of gun violence, policing and mass incarceration in the United States, he was singled out. At the first layer of White House security, several fellow guests received green passes. He was given a pink pass with the words, “Needs Escort.” He was eventually pulled aside by a Secret Service agent who at first told him he could not enter. He soon learned the special attention was because of his time in prison—the very experience that makes his voice so sought out by criminal justice policymakers around the country, including those who work for the President. In the 15 years since Martin was released from prison, he rose to become vice-president of the Fortune Society in New York—a leading nonprofit that helps former inmates reintegrate into society— and in 2014, he left to form JustLeadershipUSA, an advocacy group staffed by ex-inmates, which lobbies for better prison conditions as well as support for re-entry programs. He said in an interview with The Crime Report that his White House treatment underlined the work that still needs to be done to end the systemic discrimination that prevents ex-inmates from accessing jobs, housing, healthcare and other basic needs. While Obama and other elected leaders have called for reform, he said, the incident shows that actual change has been slow. “The truth is that their actions don’t appear to match up with the rhetoric yet. This is the chance to inject the voices of the communities who are impacted by this, but we’re still treated like threats,” Martin said. At the White House, it didn’t matter that Martin was an invited guest. He was forced to wait with Secret Service agents as the people with whom he was preparing to discuss the ramifications of mass incarceration walked by. “In some strange way it felt very prison-like,” Martin recalled. “To be stopped by a person dressed like he’s in a police uniform, and he’s not telling you why. And then you just go where you’re told without explanation.” He said he was told the person who invited him had to come get him. “I said, ‘So you think Roy Austin, Jr. is going to come downstairs and help me?” Martin said, referring to the director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs, Justice, and Opportunity. He might never have gotten in at all, if a White House staffer had not happened to walk by, realized he was invited, and gotten him through security. He was still required to have an escort at all times. “They were apologetic and probably a little bit embarrassed about it,” Martin said of some presidential staff. “They said they recognized it as a problem with previous visitors.” Martin said he has since heard from other advocates with criminal records who have had similar experiences at the White House. “I know a lot of people who are tenacious advocates and have been through this, but haven’t done anything about it, because they didn’t want speaking out about it to hurt (their advocacy),” Martin said. “I guess they think it’s going to be embarrassing to the administration.” Please enable JavaScript to view the &amp;amp;lt;a href=”http://disqus.com/?ref_noscript”&amp;amp;gt;comments powered by Disqus.&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt; <!– Comments –>   Read more