“Congress must act to enact a fairer federal sentencing system”, the White House added in a tweet Tuesday.
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CNN reports that in addition to the latest batch of reduced sentences, President Obama is responsible for reducing a total of 673 prisoners’ time spent behind bars.
The majority were nonviolent offenders sentenced for drug crimes. Thirty-five of those who were granted relief Tuesday had been serving life sentences.
Obama broke his previous single-day record when he pardoned 214 federal inmates earlier this month.
“While I expect that the President will continue to grant commutations through the end of this administration, the individualized nature of this relief highlights the need for bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation, including reforms that address excessive mandatory minimum sentences”, White House counsel Neil Eggleston wrote in a statement. Kids are now growing up without parents.
Obama said at a recent news conference that these drug sentences “perpetuate a cycle of poverty and disorder, noting “it is a disproportionately young men of color that are being arrested at higher rates, charged and convicted at higher rates, and imprisoned for longer sentences”, according to the Washington Post”. Thirty-five individuals also had their life sentences commuted.
Despite the harsh critiques from prison advocates who don’t believe that the clemency program is working fairly for all, the DOJ will be able to consider applications from all drug criminals before Obama leaves office in 2017.
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Out of the thousands of clemency requests Obama received, he quietly rejected 2,227 of them on August 8, USA Today reports.
