WHEN Barack Obama took office seven years ago, many wondered whether the first black president would pursue an agenda that brought particular attention to racial inequality. A year later, the New York Timeswrote that Mr Obama had “steered clear of putting race front and centre in his administration”, sparking some frustration among black leaders. Later in his presidency, Mr Obama has been less reticent about addressing injustices that harm black people. Last summer, he sang “Amazing Grace” during his eulogy for the black pastor who died during a church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. But Mr Obama continues to emphasise action over rhetoric. Nowhere is this more evident than in his continuing efforts to reform the criminal justice system, an American institution that incarcerates nearly 1m black people. According to statistics provided by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the fact-gathering wing of the Department of Justice, non-Hispanic blacks make up about 13% of America’s population and about 40% of its prison population.
Mr Obama’s most recent focus has been the overuse of solitary confinement in American prisons. In an op-ed in the Washington Post this week, he outlined plans for changing the rules in federal prisons whereby inmates are holed up in tiny cells bereft of human contact, often for months on end. The punishment within a punishment, Mr Obama notes, can have “devastating, lasting psychological consequences” including “depression, alienation, withdrawal” and violence. Following proposals from the justice department, Mr Obama says he will ban the use of solitary confinement for juveniles and for trivial rule-breaking. Mental health services will be expanded, and individuals in solitary confinement will have more time outside their cells each day. He estimates these reforms will benefit 10,000 inmates in federal prisons. True to his understated approach to race, Mr Obama opened his op-ed without mentioning that Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old who sat jail for three years for stealing a backpack, was African American. Mr Browder was never actually tried for his alleged crime. He spent nearly two years in solitary confinement during his stint at New York’s Riker’s Island and committed suicide aged 22.
