‘Today’ Presents First Look at President Obama’s Prison Visit

In July, President Obama made history when he became the first sitting U.S. president to visit a federal prison. His visit to El Reno Federal Correction Institution in Oklahoma was captured by Vice. The president visited the facility to help raise awareness about his efforts to correct the nation’s mass incarceration problem. He sat with six nonviolent convicted felons to talk about it, and Today presented some of that footage Monday.

Obama told the assembled prisoners, “As a society, we seem to be OK with certain communities just being locked in this cycle where kids are being raised around drug crime, they naturally gravitate toward drug crime, they then get involved in the criminal justice system, and it just churns and everyone thinks that’s normal.”

In a revealing moment, Obama talked about his absent father. “I didn’t know my dad. And too many of our young people don’t know their dads,” he said. “And obviously for them to be able to see you in a strong, positive way, that’s going to have an impact. I met Dad for one month when I was 10 years old. That was the only time I met him.”

The president alluded to the fact that his own youth was not too different from those of the men sitting around him. “I did a lot of stupid stuff when I was young,” Obama admitted. “But, I’ve said this before, I was just in an environment where you could afford to make some mistakes. I had more of a margin of error than a lot of kids do.”

Obama’s visit will be covered in full on Vice Special Report: Fixing the System, which airs Sunday on HBO.

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