Congress has shown that prisons cost taxpayers nearly $60 billion each year to operate. The Pew Report shows that 1 in every 31 people in America is under the correctional system’s supervision. Academics have shown that prisoners who worked to educate themselves were the least likely to recidivate. Yet more expenditures have gone to erecting prison boundaries than have gone to preparing offenders for law abiding lives upon release.

One improvement President Obama could make would be to order the Director of the Bureau of Prisons to abide by the recommendations of Congress as published in The Second Chance Act. That Act suggested that administrators implement programs to help prisoners nurture family ties. Family ties represent the surest way to prepare offenders for success upon release. The Director should immediately lift restrictions that block prisoners from being able to nurture ties with family through the telephone, visits, and e-mail.

President Obama should also use the power of his office to influence legislation that would encourage prisoners to work toward earning freedom through merit. Congress ought to provide an objective path for offenders to follow that would allow them to reconcile with society. Those who built records that demonstrated they could function in society as law-abiding citizens, and redeemed themselves through merit, should find graduated increases in freedom.

Finally, I would suggest that President Obama order the Pardon Attorney to evaluate all prisoner petitions who seek executive clemency. Those prisoners who have earned freedom ought not be barred from access to acts of compassion, as Justice Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court urged.

Our country has been wrong in measuring justice through the turning of calendar pages. A better measurement for our enlightened society would be to measure justice by an individual’s efforts toward reconciling with society. Alex Gomez was a criminal justice student who inspired these thoughts through questions he asked me.

The post President Obama’s Prison Reform Advisor appeared first on Prison News Blog.

I felt surprise at the shift in emotions. My imprisonment began in 1987, more than 21 years ago. I began serving the sentence when I was 23, and I have nearly crossed the fulcrum that would disperse the greater weight of my life in prison than in society. This term has been my only period of confinement and I have no history of violence. For the most part, I have grown numb to the boundaries that surround me, and the stigma of my predicament. Prison has been my life.

From the beginning, I have worked hard and consistently to reconcile with society for the bad decisions I made as a younger man. During the early years of my sentence, I lived with the idealism that I could earn my freedom through merit. With that goal as my beacon, I worked for years to educate myself, to contribute to society, and to prepare in every way so that I could emerge from confinement as a contributing citizen.

When Bill Clinton won the White House, I naively clung to the beam of his campaign. Slightly more than five years had passed since steel gates locked me inside prison walls. By then I had earned an undergraduate degree and was enrolled in graduate school. With dreams that my transformative adjustment would influence a favorable decision, I submitted my first petition for clemency.

In 1995, Hofstra University awarded my Masters Degree and I was beginning a PhD program at the University of Connecticut. I was 31-years-old, and well educated. After more than eight years of prison, I felt as ready as possible to begin living in society as a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen. In 1996, however, my prison case manager delivered a terse statement from the Department of Justice. For reasons that did not merit an explanation or review, my petition for clemency had been denied.

With the beginning of my second decade in prison, I resolved myself to the reality that I would serve several more years. The new Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, passed more punitive legislation. The hope for relief that carried me through my first decade vanished. I settled in to the likelihood that I would serve longer than a quarter century in federal prison.

In letting go of dreams that I could somehow influence the advancement of my release date, I had to change my adjustment pattern. I committed to the pursuit of activities that might bring meaning to my life while I served a lengthy prison term. In some way, I hoped my work would contribute to society.

With help from mentors, I worked to develop writing skills. Those efforts comforted me through my solitude. Simultaneously, writing offered opportunities to help others understand prisons, the people they held, and strategies to grow through confinement.

Since that adjustment shift, I have come to accept my imprisonment. I passed through all of the Clinton years, and now we have come to the final days of the Bush years. With so much prison behind me, I believed myself immune to the disease of despondency. Yet when I read that President Bush had commuted the prison terms of two others, I felt a terrific sense of loss.

I called my wife, who has endured nearly 10 years of this journey beside me. She had not yet heard the news of the commutations. I asked her to research the prisoners whose terms had been cut. I wanted to know if they had done more to earn freedom. Carole, as always, expressed her unyielding support. She could sense my sadness and offered her characteristic encouragement to lift my spirits.

“Your release will be much more magnificent,” she said. I didn’t know what my wife meant, but I loved her for helping me through an unanticipated difficult moment. I put an end to the day quite early, stretching out on my steel rack of a bed before 7:00 in the evening. I read for a while, prayed for strength, and drifted into sleep. When I awoke this morning, I felt more in control of my emotions. The Thanksgiving holiday was only two days away. Many years of prison were behind me and more were ahead, but I could still feel gratitude for the blessings in my life.

The post A Long-term Prisoner’s Reaction to Bush’s Clemency Orders appeared first on Prison News Blog.

The United States Constitution, in Article II, Section 2, provides the President with the authority to pardon individuals for federal crimes. A pardon is a form of clemency. More than one type of pardon exists. With the general pardon, the President extends an act of grace that relieves the individual of the legal consequences that follow a specific crime. A conditional pardon, on the other hand, requires something specific from an individual in order for the pardon to be effective.

Amnesty is another form of executive clemency that falls under the President’s pardon power. Rather than granting amnesty to a single individual, Presidents grant amnesty to certain classes of people who may be subject to criminal charges but have not yet been convicted. President Carter, for example, granted amnesty to those who were subjected to criminal charges for evading the draft during the Vietnam War.

A reprieve is a pardon that suspends or postpones the execution of a sentence for a definite time. A reprieve does not excuse or change the sentence that the court imposed. Rather, a reprieve simply delays it temporarily.

A commutation of sentence, on the other hand, changes the punishment to a less severe sentence. President Bush was kind enough to commute the sentence of his friend, Scooter Libby, after a jury convicted Libby of federal crimes during the scandal that put an American intelligence officer’s life at risk for political manipulation. Rather than allowing Scooter Libby to serve the time in prison that a federal judge imposed, President Bush commuted the prison portion of Libby’s sentence by eliminating the prison time; President Bush avowed that his friend had suffered enough through the trial and did not need to serve time in prison.

In the federal system, prisoners may request an application for executive clemency from the case manager. If the individual chooses, he may write to the office of the Pardon Attorney for an application, or he can ask someone with Internet access to download an application for clemency from the Pardon Attorney’s Web site.

Under President Bush, the Pardon Attorney may have been the most laid-back position in the administration. There has been virtually no attention paid to the thousands of applications for clemency that have been on file. President Bush has been reluctant to extend acts of grace to people in prison, except for friends of the administration like Scooter Libby.

Prior to the tough-on-crime era that began with President Reagan, Presidents used their Constitutional power to pardon with more magnanimity. Fewer than 40,000 people were serving time in federal prison when I was locked inside a U.S. Penitentiary back in 1987. Yet past Presidents reviewed pardon requests regularly and commuted sentences on a regular basis. Now, with more than 200,000 people in federal custody, pardons are far rarer. During his eight years in office, President Bush has only commuted five prison terms.

I have had an application on file for executive clemency since 2003. I serve a lengthy sentence for a nonviolent drug offense. During more than 21 full years of imprisonment, I have worked hard to reconcile with society. I have educated myself, earning an undergraduate degree from Mercer University and a graduate degree from Hofstra University. I’ve published several books on the prison experience that university professors from across the United States use to educate students on the subjects of criminal justice and corrections. I have kept a clean disciplinary record and contributed to communities both inside and outside of prison boundaries. Most importantly, I have built and nurtured a family that will assist my transition upon release. My hopes were that those records of redemption would advance my candidacy for relief from my sentence. Yet under President Bush’s administration, my petition for clemency has gathered dust with thousands of others in the office of the Pardon Attorney.

With President-elect Obama, I have more hope. I remain grounded in reality, but I feel confident that President Obama will appoint a Pardon Attorney who will share the same vision as our country’s new President. Rather than extinguishing hope, as President Bush so expertly did, President Obama inspires all Americans to reach their highest potential. Perhaps next year, some human beings, as well as turkeys, will receive acts of grace and compassion from our new President.

The post President Bush Will Pardon Turkey before Humans: A Pardon Primer appeared first on Prison News Blog.