The New York Times:
On Thursday, for the first time in American history, a president walked into a federal prison. President Obama was there to see for himself a small piece of the damage that the nation’s decades-long binge of mass incarceration has wrought.
Mr. Obama’s visit to El Reno, a medium-security prison in Oklahoma, capped off a week in which he spoke powerfully about the failings of a criminal justice system that has damaged an entire generation of Americans, locking up millions — disproportionately men of color — at a crippling cost to them, their families and communities, as well as to the taxpayers and society as a whole. [...] “If you’re a low-level drug dealer, or you violate your parole, you owe some debt to society,” Mr. Obama said. “You have to be held accountable and make amends. But you don’t owe 20 years. You don’t owe a life sentence.”
Mandatory minimums like these should be reduced or eliminated completely, he said. Judges should have more discretion to shape sentences and to use alternatives to prison, like drug courts or community programs, that are cheaper and can be more effective at keeping people from returning to crime.
The Washington Post:
Mr. Obama and a bipartisan gaggle of federal lawmakers want to apply the states’ insights to the federal system. The most significant bill on the table — the House’s Safe, Accountable, Fair, and Effective (SAFE) Justice Act — would reserve drug trafficking life sentences and other major penalties for drug bosses rather than low-level dealers, give more sentencing flexibility to judges and focus federal resources away from drug possession enforcement. It would create specialized courts for drug crimes and the mentally ill. It would also put a much greater emphasis on prison programming — job training, mental-health care, substance-abuse treatment — and better post-release supervision.
The bill isn’t perfect. It wouldn’t give felons who have served their time the right to vote in federal elections, for example. Nor would it do enough to cut back on the rampant overuse of solitary confinement. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or even years at a time?” Mr. Obama asked this week. States such as Colorado, Maine and Mississippi are drastically reducing their use of solitary. Mr. Obama has ordered a Justice Department review. But Congress doesn’t need to wait for the results; the horrifying scandal of America’s overuse of solitary confinement is already well-known.
Much more on the day's top stories below the fold.
Roque Planas examines Donald Trump's poll numbers with Latino voters:
Donald Trump would lose the Latino vote by a long shot in a presidential election, according to a national poll of Hispanic voters conducted by Bendixen & Amandi and the Tarrance Group on behalf of Univision.
Only 16 percent of those surveyed said they would vote for Trump if the presidential election were held today and he faced Hillary Clinton as a Democratic challenger. That result is well below the 27 percent figure GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney walked away with after the 2016 presidential election. Romney’s performance was the worst among Latino voters by a presidential candidate since Bob Dole’s unsuccessful run in 1996.
Michelangelo Signorile at The Huffington Post examines Scott Walker's treatment of gay Americans:
Scott Walker thought he was playing a deft game. For a while the Wisconsin governor, running for the GOP nomination for the presidency, has been engaging in his own version of dog-whistling to homophobes, as he and the GOP struggle with the reality that the base of their party is still in the Stone Age on LGBT rights, while most Americans support equality. But this week it blew up in spectacular fashion as Walker stepped on the Ben Carson third rail and blatantly implied gay men are predators who can't be trusted around children. [...]
Ever since Jeb Bush used the words "safeguard religious liberty" in response to marriage equality in Florida, we knew that gay-bashing was going to be a mainstay of GOP presidential candidates, though it would be in code words. It's encouraging to see Walker's overt pandering to bigots blew up. But when Bush used "safeguard religious liberty" in the same breadth in which he said we have to respect gay couples and the "rule of law", even though he still is opposed marriage equality, the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay group, praised him for supposedly supporting gay couples yet didn't criticize him for the "religious liberty" code. The group rightly has been lambasting Scott Walker and his blatantly defamatory comments.
Ryan Lizza at The New Yorker:
“It’s very bad,” McCain, who was eager to talk about Trump, told me on Monday when I stopped by his Senate office. The Senator is up for reëlection in 2016, and he pays close attention to how the issue of immigration is playing in his state. He was particularly rankled by Trump’s rally. “This performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me,” McCain said. “Because what he did was he fired up the crazies.”
Jay Bookman at The Atlanta Journal Constitution compares Obama and Reagan's Iran responses:
Context is also important. All of the above was occurring just two or three years after the assault on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that had killed 242 Marines, an attack perpetrated by the same terror groups with whom Reagan was exchanging arms for hostages. It occurred five or six years after Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans captive. That was the era and these were the people to whom Reagan was sending arms.
Now, by any objective, historic standard, which president was acting from a position of strength and resolve, and which from a position of weakness? Which was willing to make and stick by difficult decisions, and which was willing to surrender and give our enemies what they sought?
Former CEO of Reddit Ellen Pao:
I have just endured one of the largest trolling attacks in history. And I have just been blessed with the most astonishing human responses to that attack.
What happened to me while head of the popular online forum Reddit for the past eight months is important to consider as we confront the ways in which the Internet is evolving. Here’s why:
The Internet started as a bastion for free expression. It encouraged broad engagement and a diversity of ideas. Over time, however, that openness has enabled the harassment of people for their views, experiences, appearances or demographic backgrounds. Balancing free expression with privacy and the protection of participants has always been a challenge for open-content platforms on the Internet. But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning.
Fully 40 percent of online users have experienced bullying, harassment and intimidation, according to Pew Research. Some 70 percent of users between age 18 and 24 say they’ve been the target of harassers.