Staying true to his word and doing what he can to right the wrongs of the War on Drugs, President Obama once again used his presidential powers and prerogative to grant clemency to 72 more drug war prisoners last Friday.
The running total of prison sentences President Obama has commuted so far during his term is now 944. With 760 sentences commuted in the last year alone, Obama is setting a new standard for acts of compassion and forgiveness by a sitting president.
“What President Obama has done for commutations is unprecedented in the modern era,” White House counsel Neil Eggleston wrote in a blog post. “The president is committed to reinvigorating the clemency authority, demonstrating that our nation is a nation of second chances, where mistakes from the past will not deprive deserving individuals of the opportunity to rejoin society and contribute to their families and communities.”
Since the re-launch of the War on Drugs in the 1980s, courtesy of the Reagan administration, “soft-on-crime” policies haven’t been the most popular. In this age of mass incarceration, giving second chances to those convicted of drug war crimes has been viewed as career suicide by our elected officials. But President Obama has stood up for what he believes in. Hopefully his replacement in the White House will continue his efforts.
“The president has been clear that his goal is to commute the sentences of those who have truly rehabilitated themselves and do not have a propensity for violence,” said a White House official, according to The Hill, indicating that Obama differentiates between violent and non-violent offenders.
Facing claims from Republican stalwarts who say Obama is releasing violent and dangerous criminals, the president has stood resolute in his actions.
“These are not people picked up for smoking pot on a street corner,” Thomas Fitton, president of conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, told The Hill last week. “These are key figures in major drug operations.” But Fitton has it wrong. The beneficiaries of these commutations from Obama are for the majority low-level, non-violent offenders like Timothy Tyler, a Deadhead who was serving life for LSD, who was pardoned by the president in August.
With hip-hop superstars like Jay Z and T.I. denouncing the racist and punitive War on Drugs, the relief Obama is granting these individuals is not only necessary, but the right thing to do. Our system of mass incarceration has been built up one person at time, and now the president is attempting to undo the damage—one individual at a time.