Liberals love to tell everyone how corrupt the prison and justice system is in America. It thrives on targeting minorities and accomplishes nothing. That’s a big part of how Obama justified his record-setting approach to pardons. You won’t be surprised to learn that the liberals are wrong once again. We can look specifically at Obama pardon cases to prove that he and his party are promote absolute falsehoods.
Obama Clemency
As a quick review, let’s emphasize the difference between a traditional pardon and a commuted sentence. Traditional pardons wipe the slate clean for people who were convicted, served their time and were released. Commuting a sentence cuts it short so convicted individuals get out of jail early. It is with commuted sentences that Obama set presidential records by ending more sentences than the 13 presidents before him combined.
The vast majority of sentences Obama commuted were for non-violent narcotic drug offenders. In short, these were people caught possessing, using and distributing. An official statistic has not been released, but the trend is obvious enough to notice that a vast majority of commuted sentences were for black individuals. The saying at the Justice Department is “mostly black mostly crack.” Obama has even admitted that his clemency was racially motivated in an effort to correct a racially biased system.
The Left and Drugs
Obama is hardly a revolutionary for the left. Their stance for many years has been that drugs aren’t bad and that the criminal justice system is far too harsh with punishment. Efforts to decriminalize and even legalize drug use across the countries are ongoing. There are two narratives that push this effort.
First, the claim is that the war on drugs was cooked up by conservatives as a way to unjustly jail black Americans. The second is that programs focused on treating addiction and rehabilitation are more effective than prison. Raw statistics contradict both of these claims, so let’s start with rehab.
While the prison system is imperfect, inmates are usually kept drug free. This means anyone released has been clean for the duration of their internment. So, let’s look at Obama’s correctional adjustment and see what happened. Among drug-related sentences that were commuted, 76.1 percent of offenders were re-arrested on drug charges within 2 years of release (this statistic does not yet account for the 300 plus prisoners released on Obama’s last day in office).
In every case, there is no question of guilt. Charged persons have tested positive for narcotics and been caught in possession. This irrevocably falsifies the notion that giving narcotics criminals a chance to be clean is sufficient to combat the problem, but it doesn’t stop here.
Success of the War on Drugs
Liberals will interject at this point. Just because they did drugs doesn’t mean they hurt anyone! This too is a statistical falsehood. Narcotics have the highest incidence of fatal overdose of any illegal drugs. Worse, they are strongly linked to violent crime. Rather than get into the full tangled mess of statistical links between this class of drugs and violent crime, we’ll discuss the biggest and most important finding. The war on drugs began in the late 70s and was mostly pushed in the 80s and 90s. Technically it is ongoing, but the laws and precedent have been fairly static for the last 20 years.
Since the start of the war on drugs, violent crime in the country has fallen drastically. Homicide, gun crime, domestic violence and everything else in the category is roughly one-third the rate it was at the turn of the century, and that rate was substantially lower than the decade prior. Even as the population has risen, the total number of violent crimes in the U.S. has dropped sharply. This is an almost 40-year trend, and during that span gun regulation have come and gone. Parties have switched power. Wars have begun and ended. The only consistent effort that has held steady with this decline is the war on drugs. America may have high incarceration rates and all of the other issues liberals complain about, but the system has been effective. In fact, the war on drugs has ushered in the sharpest decline in violent crime ever recorded in any society.
Decriminalizing drugs is either willful ignorance of irrefutable evidence or a deliberate attempt to destabilize the country. Either way, it is a bad idea. All of the rationalizations in the world can’t change the fact that the only admittedly, overt action of racism by the Justice Department was performed by Obama himself.
~ Christian Patriot Daily
