US President Barack Obama Tuesday commuted the sentences of 111 prisoners, mostly convicted drug micro-trafficking cases, and thus established a record of presidential pardons in one month, the White House said.
AFP
These pardons are added to 111 other 214 approved by Obama during this month, ie a total of 325 in August.
In his two terms, Obama, who increasingly uses the power of pardon, 673 times exercised that right of grace, that is more than any of his ten predecessors. and implements its call for a penal reform that gives "a second chance".
It is considered that the prisoners who benefited from these commutations of sentence do not pose a danger to society. Most are drug dealers retail, although in some cases they received lengthy sentences because of a very repressive penal system, which today is denounced as excessive.
Some were serving life sentences. This is the case of 35 of the 111 convicted benefited from pardons.
Obama was in favor of alternative sentences to prison for young offenders, finding the failure of a criminal policy that has long since become the systematic closure on key crime-fighting.
In the United States there are more than 2.2 million people behind bars, including predominant abusers of marginalized minorities.