Posted on 08/13/2013 7:06:48 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
President Obama knows something about being a low-level, nonviolent drug offender, such as the kind the Justice Department today exempted from harsh mandatory prison sentences.
In a sense, he was one himself once, although the young Barry Obama was never arrested or charged with a crime.
Obama wrote openly in his 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” about using marijuana and “maybe a little blow” during his high school days in Hawaii in the 1970s. Biographer David Maraniss reported that Obama was even a pot-smoking trend-setter and leader in the “Choom Gang.”
But decades later, openly reflecting on the “stupid” choices he made, Obama has hinted that his career trajectory could have been different if he had been arrested and charged. A disproportionate number of young African-American men are put behind bars for low-level drug offenses, at 10 times the rate of whites, according to the NAACP.
It’s against this backdrop of personal experience that Obama has been quietly retooling the government’s five-decade “war on drugs,” treating it more as a public health issue than a battle against crime. It’s a shift that today came to the fore.
“With an outsized, unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, deter and rehabilitate, not merely to warehouse and forget,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in announcing the changes to mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug offenders.
The new sentencing guidelines are expected to dramatically diminish imprisonment of “low-level, nonviolent drug offenders who have no ties to large-scale organizations, gangs or cartels.” Instead, offenders will get sentences “better suited to their individual conduct,” including drug treatment and community service programs, says the Justice Department.
These changes come on top of Obama’s directive last year that federal prosecutors should back off on individual, recreational users ~snip~ drugs.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
He was guilty of FEDERAL crime? That is trafficking and other offenses.
Actually I agree with Obama on this. Low level drug offenses are a State criminal law concern. I am against a massive Federal police force that has given itself jurisdiction over all kinds of offenses that have always been state matters. It’s a major step toward tyranny.
/johnny
Punishments for crimes under some of those laws are excessively punitive, therefore too costly when there are much bigger fish to fry, especially in the post-9/11 America.
Does this mean that they plan to go easy on forgery and identity theft too?
Obama’s own drug use is a solid indicator that drug use should disqualify a person for the presidency.
Yup. In fact it was one of those issues that sparked the American revolution. The colonists didn’t like punishments imposed from across the sea when locals could better decide what was appropriate.
Absolutely. That is the first thing I thought when reading this article.
....AND what was he “doing” while Bengauzi burned?
Yes. That’s what everybody wants to know. Why couldn’t he be awakened when our Ambassador was being murdered?
” Obama has hinted that his career trajectory could have been different if he had been arrested and charged.”
Sigh
He was doing blow and Reggie Love..
Be still my heart!
You bet. Combine civil asset forfeitures (a major fruit of the WOD) with complete government data acquisition of all of your finances, and you have a very dangerous potential for arbitrary confiscation of property.
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