Obama's prison initiative right move

The recent announcement that the U.S. Justice Department is going to extend clemency to some drug offenders prompted predictable criticism from some law-and-order Republicans.

Sure, there are justified objections to the Obama administration’s use of executive actions, especially when those actions are considered collectively as a habit of skirting legislation or the Constitution. But in this case the concerns are overwrought, because rolling back mandatory drug sentencing laws is something that should be done for justifiable reasons.

For starters, harsh mandatory sentencing laws passed in the 1980s removed discretion from the justice system, leaving judges no choice but to bring the hammer down on all offenders regardless of considerable circumstantial differences from one case to the next. The sentencing laws most sternly applied to the use or distribution of crack cocaine, a drug that disproportionately impacted minorities.

Sentences for possession of a given amount of crack were on par with someone possessing roughly 100 times that amount in powdered cocaine.

The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 was largely intended to address this disparity, and the new clemency initiative is intended to extend equity to inmates sentenced prior to 2010.

It is hardly a soft-on-crime measure because of multiple conditions that must be met.

To qualify, inmates must have served 10 years of their sentence and have no other significant criminal record. They can’t have any ties to gangs or organized crime, and they have to have good behavior records while incarcerated.

Sounds appropriate, especially if one considers a person who may have had the misfortune to become a crack addict in some of the poorest, most disadvantaged communities in the country.

Then there is the issue of a federal corrections system that is  estimated to be 35 to 40 percent over capacity in terms of inmates. Many states have been in the same situation and have already taken similar actions to weed out their prisons’ least dangerous offenders.

Cost is not irrelevant, at the state or federal level; having appropriate sentences not only serves justice but it also serves the taxpayers.

Finally, opinion polls show that Americans have been moving away from the “War on Drugs” approach over the last couple of decades, deeming treatment as the best way to address what in many cases are some of the most unfortunate people in society.

Let’s give credit where credit is due; in this case, President Obama is right on track.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.