Obama Commutes Sentences of 8 Federal Inmates Serving Time for Crack Cocaine Charges

From NBC News:

By Carrie Dann, NBC News

President Barack Obama has commuted the sentences of eight individuals convicted of crack cocaine offenses.

In a statement, Obama said the commutation “is an important step toward restoring fundamental ideals of justice and fairness” and noted that he signed legislation in 2010 to narrow the disparity between penalties for crimes related to powder and crack cocaine.

Obama has pushed to change criminal justice policy to correct what his administration calls unfairness in sentencing and to keep down the cost of lengthy incarcerations for non-violent crimes.
“If they had been sentenced under the current law, many of them would have already served their time and paid their debt to society,” he said of inmates sentenced before the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act. “Instead, because of a disparity in the law that is now recognized as unjust, they remain in prison, separated from their families and their communities, at a cost of millions of taxpayer dollars each year."

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney is asked Thursday about the administration's decision to shorten the sentences of a group of individuals convicted of crack cocaine offenses.

 

Obama also called on Congress to pass pending legislation that would make the Fair Sentencing Act retroactive for some offenders.

Each of the eight offenders has served over 15 years in prison for the drug crimes.
One of the individuals, Clarence Aaron of Mobile, Ala., was convicted in the early 1990s at the age of 22 for conspiracy to distribute cocaine. Aaron's lawyer Margaret Love told NBC News that Aaron was "overcome" with emotion and that he will head to a halfway house in his hometown in coming weeks.

The president also pardoned thirteen other individuals for crimes ranging from drug offenses to money laundering to theft.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund praised the decision in a statement.
"The president's ability to commute sentences is an extraordinary power, and his decision to exercise that power in these cases sends a powerful signal that the White House is committed to reducing mass incarceration and working to restore fairness to the criminal justice system," said Sherrilyn A. Ifill, the group's president.

The Obama administration has been vocal about the need to reduce the sentencing disparity and to avoid triggering mandatory minimum sentences in drug cases.

In August, Attorney General Eric Holder directed federal prosecutors not to report the amount of drugs involved in an arrest if it would trigger mandatory minimums. The order applied to non-violent offenders who have no ties to drug cartels or gangs and who did not sell to children.

The attorney general said too many Americans get long prison sentences that don't fit the crime. "With an outsized, unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, deter, and rehabilitate -- not merely to warehouse and forget."

 The number of inmates in federal prison, roughly 219,000, is eight times what it was 30 years ago, and 40 percent over capacity. Nearly half are there for drug related crimes and roughly one-fourth of them were low-level offenders.

The New Jim Crow: Michelle Alexander on the Colbert Report

Here's a clip of Stephen Colbert's interview with Michelle Alexander, civil rights lawyer, professor and author of the book The New Jim Crow.  In The New Jim Crow, Alexander discusses how various policies implemented through incarceration and related 'collateral consequences' serve as contemporary versions of the poll tax and literacy test of the pre-civil rights era.  As such, these barriers serve as modern forms of controlling and disenfranchising African Americans.

 

Incarceration Map and Chart

These are originally from a Pew report on incarceration that was published in 2008 called 1 in 100 Behind Bars.  I actually found these on someone's blog when I was searching comparisons in state spending for education and prison.

The State of Sentencing 2011: Developments in Policy and Practice

The Sentencing Project, which is a Washington DC based, national advocacy organization on reducing unequal incarceration and criminal justice practices just released The State of Sentencing 2011: Developments in Policy and Practice.  This report highlights some of the policy changes different states have implemented in 2011 that help either reduce their reliance on incarceration and/or address the racism that is institutionalized within the system.  Some highlights for Louisiana include the following (below the break):

Interview with Michelle Alexander: Author of The New Jim Crow

Here's an interview with Michelle Alexander on Fresh Air.  She recently wrote a book called "The New Jim Crow" in which she discusses the way the U.S. uses it's criminal justice system to continue controlling people of color, particularly African American men.   She offers a detailed and insightful critique of the War on Drugs and how it's impacted poor, urban communities of color, and the consequences of this for future trajectories.  She links this to past systems of control and as a conservative outgrowth of the Civil Rights movement and the GOP's "Southern Strategy."

Prison Proliferation: 1778-2005

Here's a great visual representation of the growth of prisons in the U.S. over the past couple centuries.  The green dots represent prison construction from 1778-1900 (122 years).  The yellow dots represent prison construction from 1901-1940 (39 years); orange dots from 1941-1980 (39 years) and the red dots from 1980-2005 (25 years).  The artist does a great job capturing the growth in the prison industry since the Civil Rights movement and the recent War on Drugs.  This is when prison became political and the number of those incarcerated in state and federal prison grew from around 300,000 (early 1970s) to 2.3 million (today). This represents the greatest number and rate of incarceration in the world.  That's right, in the world. China might share the title, depending on measurement.  Further, the U.S. incarceration rate for African Americans is over 2,000 per 100,000--4,919 black men per 100,000 according to the Department of Justice.  This represents a higher incarceration rate than was the case in apartheid South Africa.  Not surprisingly, the growth in incarceration has had virtually no effect on violent crime.  In fact, New Orleans has one of the highest incarceration rates for cities in the world and it's still one of the most violent cities in the U.S.   Check it out, it's about 10:00 minutes long.