U.S. inmates urged to seek early release

Cutting prison population, fairer sentencing are goals

U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole said Wednesday that older, harsher punishments “erode people’s confidence in our criminal-justice system.”
U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole said Wednesday that older, harsher punishments “erode people’s confidence in our criminal-justice system.”

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.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/24/2014

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