“We have a tendency … to think it’s normal that so many of our young people end up in our criminal justice system. It’s not normal. It’s not what happens in other counties. What is normal is teenagers doing stupid things. What’s normal is young people making mistakes.”

— President Obama

Doesn’t it strike you as odd that of all the men who’ve served as president of the United States, that it took the current individual — Barack Obama — to become the first one to visit a federal penitentiary?

I find it odd. It’s a long overdue examination by the head of state and government of a key component of the federal judiciary system.

President Obama went to the federal lockup in El Reno, Okla., and told corrections something they no doubt knew but rarely spoke about out loud, in public. It was that many of the non-violent criminals are no different from other young offenders who’ve made mistakes.

Lord knows I made my share when I was much younger and much less aware of the consequences one faces for making mistakes.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/president-obama-meets-non-violent-inmates-oklahoma?cid=sm_fb_msnbc

Obama talked about the explosion in the prison population. It happened in Texas, to be sure, partly because a federal judge — William Wayne Justice — ruled that overcrowding in the Texas prison system created an unconstitutional form of punishment for inmates. He ordered the state to fix the problem, so the state went on a prison-building binge — including the two units in Amarillo — to help relieve the crowding issue.

Federal drug laws became the focus of Obama’s visit to the El Reno lockup. The sentencing guidelines put non-violent offenders into prison, often serving life sentences. He recently commuted the sentences of 46 non-violent offenders and went to Oklahoma to talk up the need to rethink these sentencing guidelines.

That it took so long, though, for a sitting president to step inside one of these prisons is mind-boggling in the extreme.

Is it “normal” for teenagers who make mistakes to pay for them by spending the rest of their life behind bars?

The president said “no.”

I happen to agree with him.