The Philadelphia Citizen, 09/19/24 by Robert Saleem Holbrook: “In speeches on the Senate floor in the mid-90s, Senator Joe Biden touted his “tough-on-crime” credentials, praising Pres. Nixon’s “law and order” agenda and boasting that he had backed every crime bill since 1976. Those bills — including President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which Biden authored — helped construct the U.S. system of mass incarceration.

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden apologized for parts of the bills he pushed, and as president he supports the EQUAL Act, which would end the racially discriminatory sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses. (Biden wrote this disparity into law in his Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986.) He has also allowed some elderly and at-risk people released during the Covid pandemic to remain at home.

But if he truly wants to alter his legacy and help those harmed by the cruel, racist system he helped build, he should aggressively use his clemency power in his final months as president.

So far, Biden has pardoned or granted clemency to only 11 people (compared to 237 by Trump and 1,927 by Obama.) To be fair, this number doesn’t include the thousands of pardons he gave to people convicted of marijuana possession. Still, unless he dramatically changes course, he’s squandering an opportunity to mitigate unnecessary, state-made suffering.

While relief for people imprisoned for nonviolent drug crimes is essential, that wouldn’t be enough to reverse mass incarceration. Most people in prison were convicted of violent crimes, and many are serving extreme sentences out of step with international norms. More than 200,000 people in the United States are serving life sentences and two-thirds are people of color. U.S prisons hold 40 percent of the world’s population serving life and 83 percent of those worldwide serving life without the possibility of parole (LWOP).”

Read the full commentary here.