Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Washington: Against tough odds Douglas Lindsay made all the right choices, until the fall came and he discovered that at that time in America there were no second chances for men like him.
Lindsay finished high school and went straight into the army and after four years was honourably discharged in 1990, after which he worked at nights with mentally handicapped adults while he earned a degree in social services during the day.
It was after this that he was implicated in a conspiracy to sell crack cocaine, and he admits he did sell the drug from time to time to supplement his income while studying. But seven co-accused cut deals with the prosecutor and pointed at him as a ringleader. Lindsay alone pleaded not guilty.
According to the group Families against Mandatory Minimums, the crack house he was accused of operating was in fact run by Lindsay's aunt.
He was found guilty, and at the same time convicted of obstructing justice for submitting signed affidavits from two of his co-defendants stating that he was not involved with the case.
His lawyer, distracted and ill-prepared during Lindsay's defence, was later to be sentenced to 10 years for bribing witnesses in an unrelated case.
Although no violence was associated with the case, and although Lindsay had never been in any trouble before, the two crimes forced the judge's hand and, in 1996, he received a mandatory life sentence.
Lindsay expected to die in jail.
Then on July 13, President Barack Obama made an announcement from the White House. He had decided to use his executive authority to commute the sentences of 46 drug offenders.
Lindsay was one of them.
"These men and women were not hardened criminals, but the overwhelming majority had been sentenced to at least 20 years," the President said in a video statement explaining his decision.
"I believe that at its heart, America is a nation of second chances, and I believe these folks deserve their second chance."
This was the greatest number of people whose sentences had been commuted in a single day since Lyndon Johnson was in office.
Obama has so far commuted 89 sentences, more than the combined number of presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W Bush.
More are expected.
Presidential power is a finite and invaluable resource. With 18 months left in office, Obama has made it clear he plans to use much of his on a campaign to reform America's criminal justice system and, in particular, to end America's era of imprisonment.
"Mass incarceration makes our country worse off, and we need to do something about it," he said during a speech at the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) the day after he commuted Lindsay's sentence.
President Richard Nixon declared America's war on drugs, and subsequent presidents continued the offensive through the 1980s and 1990s.
Crime rates were high and politicians, who needed the support of white middle-class voters, felt they needed to play to their fears of lawless inner cities.
Zero tolerance crime fighting was championed at city, state and national levels. The result was the highest incarceration rates of any advanced society on earth.
In 1985 41,000 drug offenders were incarcerated in federal prisons per year. By 2010 that number had reached 500,000.
The increase in incarceration rates surged under Reagan, as did the spread of the for-profit private prison system.
But it was Clinton who ensured that so many of those caught up in the system stayed in the system.
A 365-page omnibus crime bill that Clinton signed into law in 1994 locked in place and increased many of the mandatory minimum sentences introduced under Reagan.
Anticipating the need to spend more on incarceration, the same bill cut education programs for inmates to save money.
Another part of the bill saw crack cocaine – used and sold mainly by African Americans – made somehow more criminal than powdered cocaine, preferred by white drug users.
Under this law, someone caught with 5 grams of crack would be subjected to the same mandatory sentence as someone caught with 500g of powder.
The bill offered the states billions in funding for new prisons, but only if they adopted federal-style "truth in sentencing" provisions that reduced eligibility for bail and parole.
The impact of America's addiction to incarceration has been staggering.
By the time Clinton left office, the prison population had increased by 60 per cent.
Today America holds 2.2 million of its people in its prisons. It has 5 per cent of the world's population and 25 per cent of its prisoners. There are 2.7 million children with a parent in prison.
Crime rates began to fall in America in 1990 and they have done so ever since, but analysts challenge the idea that mass incarceration has been the leading cause of this.
An exhaustive study at the beginning of the year by The Atlantic found a range of contributing factors, including increasing income levels, the ageing population, changing drinking habits, the introduction of targeted policing directed by computer tracking of criminal activity and even the removal of lead from petrol.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in The Atlantic that America's "prodigious rate of incarceration is not only inhumane, it is economic folly".
That idea is no longer controversial.
The day after Obama commuted Lindsay's sentence, he attended an NAACP conference to lay out his argument for sweeping criminal justice reform.
He was not the only president to attend that conference. Bill Clinton also made an appearance, and in it he finally disavowed his crime bill.
"Yesterday, the President spoke a long time and very well on criminal justice reform," the former president said. "But I want to say a few words about it. Because I signed a bill that made the problem worse and I want to admit it."
In his speech, Clinton acknowledged that "we had a lot people who were locked up, who were minor actors, for way too long", and further, that the aggression of police and prosecutors frayed the relationship between authorities and young African American men.
This was Obama's theme too.
In his speech, Obama charted the historical thread that binds the NAACP's fight against lynchings and the Jim Crow laws after the Civil War, against segregation, for the Civil Rights Act and the impact of mass incarceration on black Americans.
"Today, I want to focus on one aspect of American life that remains particularly skewed by race and by wealth, a source of inequity that has ripple effects on families and on communities and ultimately on our nation," he said.
"African Americans and Latinos make up 30 per cent of our population; they make up 60 per cent of our inmates. About one in every 35 African American men, one in every 88 Latino men is serving time right now. Among white men, that number is one in 214.
"The bottom line is that in too many places, black boys and black men, Latino boys and Latino men experience being treated differently under the law."
Obama was making it clear then that his push for reform was not only designed to ameliorate the needless brutality of the system, but to make effective use of his authority to address racial injustice.
This was made even more clear two days after the NAACP speech when he became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison.
At El Reno prison in Oklahoma, Obama walked through the polished corridors not to cut ribbons or boast of more funding, but to sit and talk with six non-violent drug offenders living through life sentences.
Later he took just one question from reporters and in his response he likened himself to the prisoners.
"Visiting with these six individuals," he began, pausing and choosing his words with care, "I've said this before – when they describe their youth and their childhood, these are young people who made mistakes that aren't that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made.
"The difference is they did not have the kinds of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes."
It was an extraordinary statement from a president who has admitted to his own use of marijuana and cocaine.
The impact of the visit cannot be exaggerated, says Julie Stewart, the president and founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums.
"It was the first time that these inmates had a person of power look at them and say, 'I see you.'"
Stewart says Obama's use of clemency has been symbolically significant but, given the thousands upon thousands of inmates serving life sentences for single non-violent offences, it has had little practical impact.
But she believes change is on the way. On Thursday she held a briefing for Republican staff on Capitol Hill. Hundreds attended.
Two sentencing reform bills are now circulating in Congress with bipartisan backing and she believes at least one of them is likely to pass in the coming year.
The sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine has already been overturned, but it has not been made retroactive. That reform alone would see more than 7000 prisoners released.
When he heard the news of Obama's commutations, one prisoner, Steven Tyron Johnson, serving life without parole for a non-violent drug crime, was overwhelmed.
"I am not gonna lie; I went up to my room and cried," he told Vice. "I feel that after 20 years in these prisons, the good Lord brought us Barack Obama to set things right."
