Biden Will Commute the Sentences of Nearly 1,500 ‘Non-Violent’ Offenders

In what will be America’s largest single-day act of clemency to date, Joe Biden will pardon 39 people and commute the sentences of almost 1,500 other prisoners. In a statement announcing the action, Biden said that “America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances,” and that he is pardoning people “who have shown successful rehabilitation and have shown commitment to making their communities stronger and safer.”

Biden decided to commute the sentences of nearly 1,500 people who are serving lengthy prison sentences because many of them “would receive lower sentences if charged under today’s laws, policies, and practices. These commutation recipients, who were placed on home confinement during the COVID pandemic, have successfully reintegrated into their families and communities and have shown that they deserve a second chance.”

This is the kind of action those of us criticizing him for pardoning Hunter Biden were looking for. I don’t really think that was very big of a deal in the context of a larger suite of pardons for much more deserving people, but what made it stand out was doing it by itself. That said, Biden has been punished quite a bit this year for his poor political acumen and inability to properly message his stated values, and he deserves to be praised for this move.

The American carceral state replaced slavery, as the 13th amendment has a loophole in it so large that you can drive a prison industrial complex-sized truck through it. Joe Biden helped create the modern dystopia he spoke out against in these commutations and pardons, as he was one of the architects of the tough-on-crime bill that increased our prison population quite a bit, saying in a 1993 speech that “predators on our streets” were “beyond the pale” and needed to be locked up.

That effort by Biden in the 1990s has led to the United States having the highest incarceration rate of anywhere in the world. We spend $182 billion every year to lock up about one percent of our population, including a vastly disproportionate amount of Black people, who account for roughly 14 percent of the U.S. population but 42 percent of the prison population, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt how closely tied the U.S. prison system is to the legacy of slavery. There are over ten million people incarcerated in the entire world, and 2.2 million of them are in the United States. This is a big part of the legacy of Senator Joe Biden.

While it would have been nice to see some kind of acknowledgement that his tough-on-crime bill helped fill the prisons with sentences he can commute and pardon, this is still a huge first step and Biden should be commended for taking this historic action no president has before to this degree. Additionally, Biden has promised to “take more steps in the weeks ahead” and will “continue reviewing clemency petitions to advance equal justice under the law, promote public safety, support rehabilitation and reentry, and provide meaningful second chances.”