Wolf spoke in a hotel conference room here Saturday during a
meeting held by the National Governors Association, where he touted his state’s
prison reform efforts and called for more sweeping changes.
The Democratic Pennsylvania governor, a former businessman,
criticized a system that keeps people in prison and out of the workforce
“simply because they might have made a mistake early on.” And he cautioned
against imposing probations that are too long to be effective, pointing to
Mill’s case.
Mill, a Philadelphia native, has been a key figure in the
national debate about criminal justice reform in recent years. The
chart-topping rapper’s legal drama dates back to a 2007 arrest, followed by a
2009 sentencing on gun and drug charges, Vox reported.
He was punished several times after that for probation violations, and in 2017,
he faced reckless endangerment charges after he was seen popping wheelies on
a dirt bike in New York City.
Mill “was confined to 14 years of probation, and his last
infraction was popping a wheelie,” Wolf said Saturday. “That’s the kind of
thing that is just wrong, but it’s also not very smart.”
Pennsylvania has no caps on how long people can be on
probation. That’s a problem, according to Wolf.
That “means that someone like Meek Mill, who does a wheelie,
and the judge just apparently doesn’t like Meek Mill — you end up with 14 years
being on probation with no end in sight.”
Wolf added, “I’m not sure why that would matter in any case,
but it certainly doesn’t help Meek Mill, who is ready and able to make a great
contribution to our society. It doesn’t help anybody who’s in a position to get
back into the swing of things, help their family, help their community, help
their economy. All those things are thwarted by having a bad criminal justice
system.”
After a court ordered Mill’s early release from prison last
year, the rapper appeared with Wolf at a news conference urging state lawmakers
to enact criminal justice reforms, the Associated Press reported.
Wolf, who led a kitchen cabinet and building products
company before he was elected in 2014, traces his interest in criminal justice
reform back to the private sector.
“Like most business people, for most of the time that I was
in business, I automatically excluded anybody who had any brush with the law.
We did a background check, you had a record, you did anything, you were out. We
didn’t even interview you,” he said.
About six or seven years ago, his company decided to change
that “to say, ‘Let’s give a second chance here, see what happens,’” Wolf said.
“And we found that they made for better employees. … They’re trying to prove
something.”
“This is the holy grail of politics,” Wolf said Saturday.
“You can bring extreme right and extreme left together because it’s not only
fair, it’s smart and it actually gets people back into the economy.” He added,
“Everything we do in criminal justice reform is a jobs bill.”
Beyond that, Wolf called for a broader look at mandatory
minimum sentences.
“I think we need to actually move back from the stuff we
were doing 20 years ago in this country across the board, not just in
possession of small amounts of things like marijuana, but decriminalize a lot
of activities that really should not have been criminalized in the first
place.”
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