In a fantastic move toward logic and reasoning, President Obama pardoned 22 prisoners serving decades-long sentences for nonviolent drug crimes this past Tuesday.
This comes in the wake of his turning down punishments for nonviolent crack cocaine sentencing, which once treated one gram of crack the same as 100 grams of powder cocaine in terms of sentencing.
Though many might jump to call Obama soft on drugs, we at the Editorial Board couldn’t be happier with ?his decision.
For too long, the war on drugs has destroyed the lives of ?countless Americans.
A perfect example of this would be one of the men pardoned by the president last week, Francis Darrell Hayden.
Hayden, a Kentucky man who was serving a life sentence, was initially jailed for growing marijuana.
Think about that critically for a second. Take yourself out of the modern “drugs are bad” mindset and really try to wrap your mind around that. A man was sent to die in one of the worst ?places in America for growing plants that chill people out.
It’s absolutely absurd.
Of course, the American prison system is to blame for this problem. America considers herself to be the freest country on the planet, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Although America is only 5 percent of the world’s population, we have 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.
We have 2.3 million people behind bars right now. China, which has four times our population, has 1.6 million people in prison.
America is less free than China right now. And it is entirely due to the war ?on drugs.
Though this is all shockingly horrible, perhaps the worst statistic is the fact that black men constitute a little under half of our prison population, or almost 1 million people.
The prison system has rediscovered America’s love of making money at the black man’s expense.
So why does America consider it necessary to lock up more people than any other country? For the same reason America does everything else: money.
Big, Scrooge McDuck piles of money.
For-profit prisons are becoming a huge problem in America. We have an entire industry dependent upon high incarceration rates, and it’s a main driver behind the incredibly harsh drug laws we have.
For-profit prisons consistently give money to campaigning politicians in order to keep laws as strict as they are.
In 2010, the two largest private prison companies — Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group — spent about $1 million lobbying the federal government.
Don’t worry though, that year they made more than $2.9 billion ?in revenue.
Who knew there was so much money in human suffering? Our point here is the draconian drug laws in America need to end.
We need to realize that not only is locking people up for nonviolent drug crimes wrong, it simply isn’t working.
Obama might simply be doing this for good PR, but he’s moving the ?conversation in the right direction.
