With President Obama’s speech to the NAACP and his visit to a federal prison last week, the push for criminal justice reform took center stage. His statements crystallized the growing bipartisan agreement in Congress that it’s time to overhaul a system that incarcerates nonviolent offenders for far too long and strains crowded prisons and dwindling budgets.
But bypassed in the emerging consensus is a key contributor to the problems in the federal system: the polarizing issue of immigration.
The most serious offense for roughly 10 percent of the federal prison population is immigration-related, and over half of federal criminal convictions so far this year have been for illegal entry or re-entry. As lawmakers look to lessen the criminal consequences for drug convictions, even legal immigrants also remain at risk of deportation for those same crimes.
[For more of this story, written by Christie Thompson, go to https://www.themarshallproject...ders-congress-forgot]
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