If you landed behind bars for a non-violent drug offense, President Barack Obama wants to set you free.
On Wednesday, Obama commuted the sentences of 214 federal inmates, the most granted by a president since the Department of Justice began tracking clemency data in 1900. According to the White House, Obama has granted“more commutations than the previous nine presidents combined.” The Washington Post reports he is issuing an average of seven clemency actions a month (that’s both commutations and pardons, which are different, but we’ll get to that), a faster rate than any other president since Jimmy Carter.
There’s a very specific reason for this sudden uptick in pardons: Obama is using his executive power of clemency to supplement his legislative push to undo the scars left by the War on Drugs. The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 that Obama signed into law was designed to counteract the federal mandatory minimums for possession of crack and powdered cocaine that were established by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. While the United States Sentencing Commission sought to reduce the sentences of non-violent drug offenders serving lengthy prison terms (some 6,000 inmates wereexpected for release in 2015), many of the 100,000 drug offenders in U.S. prisons don’t retroactively qualify for relief. Hence, executive clemency: Obama can unilaterally free those Americans who have “more than repaid their debt to society and earned this second chance,” as the White Houseput it last June.
[For more of this story, written by Jared Keller, go to https://psmag.com/the-slow-and...e7156bb4e#.xpsw0hacs]
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