A Positive Step: Obama Commutes Sentences for 8 Crack Cocaine Offenders

The New York Times reports Thursday morning that President Obama will use his pardoning powers to commute the sentences of eight federal inmates convicted of crack cocaine offenses. Each of the inmates has reportedly been imprisoned for at least 15 years, with six of them being sentenced to life terms.

This marks the first time Obama has used his powers of constitutional clemency of crack cocaine offenders who’d have seen reduced sentences anyhow under the 2011 law that significantly lowered the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses.

“If they had been sentenced under the current law, many of them would have already served their time and paid their debt to society,” Obama said in a prepared statement. “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.”

Each of these eight prisoners were convicted in high-profile cases during a time of heightened “crack is whack” hysteria; all of them were non-violent offenders.

As a libertarian, I disagree with this president on a great number of issues, but I have long praised him for reducing the sentencing disparity and at least paying lip service (sadly, only over the last 16 months or so) to greatly reducing the brutality of America’s war on drugs.

Of course, there’s much more to be done in ending the government’s war on its own people, and Obama himself has stood in the way of that on countless occasions, but this is an undoubtedly positive step and we should applaud him for doing so.

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.