Pubdate: Thu, 24 Apr 2014
Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock, AR)
Copyright: 2014 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc.
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U.S. INMATES URGED TO SEEK EARLY RELEASE

Cutting Prison Population, Fairer Sentencing Are Goals

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama's administration is encouraging 
some nonviolent federal prisoners to apply for early release. It's an 
effort to deal with high costs and overcrowding in prisons, and also 
a matter of fairness, the government said.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Justice Department unveiled a revamped 
clemency process directed primarily at low-level felons imprisoned 
for at least 10 years who have clean records while in custody.

The effort is part of a broader administration push to scale back 
harsh penalties in some drug-related prosecutions and to address 
sentencing disparities arising from the 1980s crack-cocaine epidemic 
that yielded disproportionately tough punishment for black drug offenders.

"These older, stringent punishments that are out of line with 
sentences imposed under today's laws erode people's confidence in our 
criminal-justice system," said Deputy Attorney General James Cole in 
laying out new criteria that will be used in evaluating clemency 
petitions for possible recommendation for the president's approval.

"We are dedicating significant time and resources to ensure that all 
potentially eligible petitions are reviewed and then processed 
quickly," Cole said. "For our criminal-justice system to be 
effective, it needs to not only be fair, but it also must be 
perceived as being fair."

Cole said the clemency initiative will be designed to identify those 
who pose no safety threat if released early.

The White House, sometimes criticized as too stingy with its clemency 
power, said it is seeking more candidates for leniency in an 
overcrowded federal prison system where costs comprise a sizable 
percentage of the Justice Department's budget.

The system's population has rocketed in recent decades, creating 
rising multibillion-dollar expenses that officials say threaten other 
law enforcement priorities and that an inspector general's report 
last year characterized as a "growing crisis."

The United States incarcerates about a quarter of the world's 
prisoners. About 1 in every 100 U.S. adults is locked up. Of the 
roughly 216,000 inmates in federal custody, nearly half are 
imprisoned for drug-related crimes.

Though the criteria apply solely to federal inmates, states, too are 
grappling with severe prison overcrowding. In Nebraska, for example, 
prisons were at 155 percent of capacity at the end of March. And in 
California, courts have ordered the state to reduce the inmate 
population to 137.5 percent of designed capacity, or 112,164 inmates 
in the 34 facilities, by February 2016.

Federal officials said now is the time to consider releasing more 
prisoners early.

"These defendants were properly held accountable for their criminal 
conduct. However, some of them, simply because of the operation of 
sentencing laws on the books at the time, received substantial 
sentences that are disproportionate to what they would receive 
today," Cole said.

Officials said they don't know how many of the tens of thousands of 
federal inmates convicted of drug-related crimes would be eligible 
for early release, but an ideal candidate would meet six criteria, 
including having no history of violence, no ties to criminal 
organizations, no gang ties and a clean prison record. He must also 
have already served 10 years or more of his sentence and be likely to 
have received a substantially shorter offense if convicted of the 
same offense today.

The Bureau of Prisons will notify all inmates of the criteria next 
week and provide electronic surveys to those who think they deserve clemency.

The Justice Department expects the vast majority of applicants to be 
drug prisoners but didn't exclude the possibility that inmates 
convicted of other crimes - financial fraud, for example - could be considered.

"It's really a coming together of decades of excessive sentencing, 
particularly in drug cases, combined with attention to the underused 
power of commutation," said Marc Mauer, executive director of the 
Sentencing Project, an organization that works on sentencing policies.

The announcement is a "fantastic step in the right direction," said 
Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. And 
Douglas Berman, a sentencing-law expert at Ohio State University, 
said it represented a "very meaningful change in both tone and 
attitude" from the days when clemency was seen as a power that 
carried "all political risk, no political reward."

The action is the latest in a series of changes the administration 
has sought to the criminal-justice system, particularly within the past year.

Attorney General Eric Holder has endorsed proposals to lower 
sentencing guideline ranges for certain drug offenders and directed 
prosecutors not to charge low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with 
crimes that entail mandatory minimum sentences.

Holder has said such steps must be taken to make the system more fair 
and to tame the growing costs of incarceration. Nearly a third of the 
Justice Department's $27.3 billion budget is dedicated to the Bureau 
of Prisons, which houses more than 200,000 inmates.

The Obama administration also has said it is working to correct the 
legacy of an old sentencing structure that subjected offenders to 
long prison terms for crack-cocaine convictions while giving far more 
lenient sentences to those caught with the powder form of the drug. 
Many of the crack convicts have been black, while those convicted of 
powder offenses have been more likely to be white.

The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced that disparity and eliminated 
a five-year mandatory minimum for first-time possession of crack, but 
the law did not cover offenders sentenced before the law was 
approved. Officials are now turning their attention to identifying 
inmates who received sentences under the old guidelines.

Some 7,000 prisoners, by some estimates, would not be incarcerated 
today if they had been sentenced under the terms of the new law, 
though not all will meet the criteria announced Wednesday.

"There are still too many people in federal prison who were sentenced 
under the old regime - and who, as a result, will have to spend far 
more time in prison than they would if sentenced today for exactly 
the same crime," Holder said in a video posted on the department's 
website. "As a society, we pay much too high a price whenever our 
system fails to deliver the just outcomes necessary to deter and punish crime."

In December, Obama cut short the sentences of eight prisoners - 
including six serving life sentences - who he said had been locked up 
too long for drug crimes. Last week, he commuted the sentence of a 
drug dealer whose sentence had been inadvertently lengthened by a 
typo. The president granted only one commutation in his first term.

The administration said it is impossible to know exactly how many new 
applicants will be eligible. Cole said about 12 percent of federal 
prison inmates have served sentences of at least 10 years, but that 
figure includes violent criminals who wouldn't meet the new criteria.

To handle the expected increase in petitions, the Justice Department 
is detailing more attorneys to the department's pardon attorney's 
office. Cole said he's also asking federal public defenders to assign 
lawyers to the office to help identify good candidates.

Maurer, of the Sentencing Project, said he didn't expect a huge 
number of inmates to qualify for clemency given the narrowness of the 
criteria, but he said the effort was significant nonetheless.

While the policy change is unlikely to make a sizable dent in the 
federal prison population, it represents the biggest clemency effort 
since Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter offered amnesty to 
Vietnam War draft evaders.

Cole said the push for clemency was not a substitute for a permanent 
change to sentencing laws.

"We still think there's a need for Congress to act," he said.

Legislation is pending in Congress that would cut the length of many 
nonviolent drug sentences and give judges more discretion by 
expanding a safety-valve provision already on the books that allows a 
limited number of nonviolent drug offenders to avoid mandatory sentences.

"It seems the Justice Department is doing what it can to help stem 
the tide of people going to prison in record numbers for absurd 
lengths of time," said Stewart, of Families Against Mandatory 
Minimums. "It really is up to Congress to take the next step and 
change the number of mandatory sentencing laws."

Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, 
agreed. He said the announcement did not address larger inequities in 
the criminal-justice system.

"We've had a significant rhetorical shift in the war on drugs," he 
said, "but we've had a moderate policy shift."

Information for this article was contributed by Eric Tucker of The 
Associated Press; by Timothy M. Phelps of the Tribune Washington 
Bureau; by Del Quentin Wilber of Bloomberg News; and by Matt Apuzzo 
of The New York Times.

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