Biden pardons 2,500 for what he claims were 'non-violent' drug offenses
In the past few weeks, following his pardon of his corrupt son, Hunter, Joe Biden has commuted and pardoned over 4,000 other people.
Here is his latest mass commutation:
Biden commutes sentences of nearly 2,500 nonviolent drug offenders
🇺🇸BIDEN DIDN’T KNOW WHAT HE SIGNED, SAYS SPEAKER JOHNSON
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) January 18, 2025
Speaker Johnson told Bari Weiss that Biden was unaware of an executive order halting LNG exports to Europe, signed weeks earlier.
During a January 2024 Oval Office meeting, Biden denied issuing the pause.… pic.twitter.com/cDQwwRt6lX
Biden has now reached the stage of cognitive and political decline in which he makes up constitutional amendments. pic.twitter.com/kS9AJFythv
— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) January 17, 2025
Swept entirely under the rug are all the more serious crimes that imprisoned drug offenders have plea-bargained away, not to mention all of the wholly undetected, unprosecuted and unpunished crimes they may have done.
Also, the fact is that virtually all drug offenders behind bars are in for drug trafficking, not mere possession. In 1991, for example, only 703 (2 percent) of the 36,648 persons admitted to federal prisons were in for drug possession. Almost all imprisoned drug traffickers, federal and state, have long criminal records, adult and juvenile. Only their latest or most serious adult conviction is for a drug offense. There are exceptional cases of truly first-time, non-violent, low-level drug offenders who end up behind bars. But they are the exceptions that prove the rule: that anyone who thinks U.S. attorneys or big-city cops focus their enforcement energies against petty drug criminals must be either statistically illiterate or smoking something.
The public believes that “nonviolent drug offenders” are just a different kind of person than real criminals, and politicians are playing into that to encourage criminal justice reforms that target nonviolent offenders and rely heavily on a treatment-heavy approach to drug prisoners.
If you believe all that, it’s easy to believe that the prison problem is easy to fix. But it isn’t — because there aren’t that many nonviolent drug offenders in the grand scheme of the criminal justice system, and because there isn’t as firm a distinction between “nonviolent drug offenders” and everyone else as the public likes to believe.
Only 20 percent of prisoners in the United States are serving time for drug offenses. The number of prisoners that politicians are willing to consider “low-level, nonviolent” drug offenders is far smaller. And those offenders often aren’t addicted to drugs, so drug treatment programs won’t help them.
On August 11, 1999, Clinton commuted the sentences of 16 members of FALN, a Puerto Rican paramilitary organization that set off 120 bombs in the United States, mostly in New York City and Chicago.