Obama's "Mingy And Belated Use Of Presidential Clemency"
Walter Olson writes at Bloomberg that while Putin is freeing more than 20,000 from his country's prisons, our president announced "a rather less grand gesture of clemency":

He commuted the sentences of eight people convicted of crack-cocaine offenses -- all of whom have served at least 15 years -- and used his pardon power to erase the criminal records of 13 miscellaneous ex-offenders.

...According to the Washington Post, one of the administration's motives was, oddly, its wish to help "eliminate overcrowding in federal prisons."

If that's the case, Obama is trying to bail out Lake Michigan with a paint can. The federal prison population has increased by more than 700 percent since 1980 and the number of inmates now exceeds the Bureau of Prisons bed capacity by 35 percent to 40 percent, requiring the use of contract prisons, halfway houses and other makeshifts.

...The War on Drugs is the single biggest driver of our bloated prison population, especially at the federal level, where thousands are serving sentences under mandatory-minimum laws that put low-level nonviolent offenders behind bars for decades, or even life. Although Congress finally acted in 2010 to reduce the notorious crack/cocaine disparity responsible for many insanely long sentences -- in part because of years of complaint from judges loath to be parties to injustice -- it declined to apply the changes retroactively to sentences already handed down.

...Yet, there is no shortage of prisoners being held long after they have met reasonable objectives of deterrence, rehabilitation and incapacitation.

It's baffling that over a quarter-century in which presidents of both parties have relentlessly sought to assert powers the Constitution never granted them they should be so meek about using the pardon powers that our constitutional system unquestionably gives them.

The people in prison for these non-violent drug offenses are disproportionately poor and black. Obama professes to be a champion of social justice. What gives? Any of you who voted for him feeling a wee bit disillusioned...disappointed...dissed?

Related: Clarence Aron's story.
More from Standard.net, from a WaPo editorial:

One person on Obama's list, Clarence Aaron, was serving three life sentences for participating in a drug deal. Another, Stephanie George, was handed a life sentence for stashing her boyfriend's drugs. These are just a couple of the nearly 9,000 people convicted under harsh anti-crack policies that Congress established in 1986 and then revised in 2010. By that point, the old standards were widely considered unfair as well as needlessly expensive.

"Because of a disparity in the law that is now recognized as unjust," Obama said last week, "they remain in prison, separated from their families and their communities, at a cost of millions of taxpayer dollars each year."

Congress and the president agree that the old rules were unwise, yet many others sitting in prison deserve a chance to show that their sentences did not fit their crimes. The fairest and most comprehensive way to give them that chance would come from Congress, which could impose a broad solution and enlist federal judges to apply it.