This morning President Joe Biden announced that he is commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 people serving longer prison terms for convictions related to crack cocaine. In doing so, Biden made history and set the record for the most total individual commutations by a president in history at over 4,000.
“Today’s clemency action provides relief for individuals who received lengthy sentences based on discredited distinctions between crack and powder cocaine, as well as outdated sentencing enhancements for drug crimes,” Biden said in a statement issued by the White House on Friday.
This distinction was set by a 1986 law drafted by then-Sen. Joe Biden that set a hundred-to-one ratio for sentencing for powder and crack cocaine. A 2010 bill lowered it to a still disproportionate eighteen-to-one and the 2018 Fair Sentencing Act reduced minimum sentences. Almost four in five people convicted of trafficking crack cocaine were Black in fiscal year 2021, compared to just 25 percent for powder cocaine.
In 2022, Biden’s Justice Department announced that it would no longer differentiate between powder and crack cocaine when seeking charges, saying the disparity had “no basis in science, furthers no law enforcement purposes, and drives unwarranted racial disparities in our criminal justice system.”
Today’s actions retroactively reduce the sentences of those who would have faced shorter prison sentences if crack and powdered cocaine had been treated the same.
Prison reform advocates are pleased. “This action is an essential step toward righting historical wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities that overwhelmingly harm Black and Latino people, and providing deserving individuals the opportunity to return to their families and communities after spending too much time behind bars,” Maya Wiley, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said in a statement,
Earlier this week, I spoke with Sarah Gersten, executive director of the Last Prisoner Project, about the push to get Biden to act in his final days as president.
She said in a statement that “President Biden’s actions remind us that meaningful change is possible when people work together and listen to what is needed to provide true justice through second chances.”
Gersten added that she hopes Biden will extend clemency to those incarcerated for federal marijuana charges. In today’s statement, Biden said he would continue to review commutations and pardons, indicating that more historic clemency could come in his last three days in office.
