edition
CAREERS special
June 20, 2018
O PINION
Page 13
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Pardons Aren’t Policy
e bony s laughter -J ohnson
Before all the North
Korea news hit, the
last few weeks seemed
to show another sur-
prising turnaround for
President Trump: some
sympathy for criminal
justice reform.
After a visit from
Kim Kardashian, the president
commuted the sentence of Alice
Marie Johnson, a great-grand-
mother serving a life sentence for a
first time, non-violent drug offense.
Then he said he’d reach out to the
NFL players taking a knee to pro-
test police brutality — players he’d
spent months antagonizing.
The president insisted that he
understood the driving purpos-
es behind the NFL protests, even
saying players could advise him
on whom to pardon next.
That’s a welcome gesture, but
it also shows that Trump doesn’t
really understand the issue. Indi-
vidual pardons can’t replace pol-
icy in addressing racial inequity.
For every individual Trump might
pardon, thousands more will face
arrest and incarceration for the
same crimes.
by
In New York City in 2017,
where black Americans
were about 24 percent
of the population, they
were 58 percent of those
stopped by police. In the
first half of that year, the
ACLU of Pennsylvania
found that black Ameri-
cans were 69 percent of
stops in Philadelphia, despite con-
stituting 48 percent of residents.
Black Americans’ interac-
tions with law enforcement are
more likely to be deadly, too. The
Washington Post found that black
Americans, who comprise 13 per-
cent of the national population,
were nearly a quarter of those shot
by police in 2017.
Instead of just pardoning a few
people, President Trump could
ask the Department of Justice to
reverse course by entering into
consent decrees — reform agree-
ments, basically — with police
departments with histories of ra-
cial misconduct and brutality.
Existing inequities follow black
Americans once they come under
the grip of the criminal justice sys-
tem.
The U.S. Sentencing Commis-
sion concluded that black men
receive sentences that are an av-
erage of nearly 20 percent longer
than “similarly situated” white
men. And the NAACP Legal De-
fense and Educational Fund found
that, as of July 2016, black Ameri-
cans were over 40 percent of those
on death row.
The Department of Justice cur-
rently mandates blind reviews of
capital punishment cases. Beyond
just pardons, Trump could extend
those reviews to other sentences to
reduce bias.
Drug enforcement and sentenc-
ing, including the now-diminished
100-to-1 crack to cocaine manda-
tory minimum sentencing dispari-
ty, are often regarded as the most
extreme example of the racist un-
derpinnings of the criminal justice
system.
Although black Americans are
no more likely to use or sell drugs
than their white counterparts,
they’re nearly 3 times more likely
to be arrested for drug offenses —
and 6.5 times more likely to be in-
carcerated. Mandatory minimum
sentences, which have been iden-
tified as one of the main drivers of
mass incarceration, impact black
Americans nearly twice as often
as white Americans.
From here, the president could
persuade lawmakers in Congress
to reform those mandatory mini-
mum sentences. He could encour-
age Attorney General Jeff Ses-
sions to rescind his memorandum
directing federal prosecutors to
“charge and pursue the most se-
rious, readily provable offense,”
against non-violent drug offend-
ers.
At the very least, he could
abandon his own embrace of puni-
tive drug rhetoric and policy.
Unfortunately, I doubt Presi-
dent Trump will do any of these
things. I’m not even sure he’ll
make good on those pardons he’s
promised to consider.
This is, after all, a man who en-
dorsed police brutality, called for
the death penalty for drug dealers,
and pardoned the racist Sheriff
Joe Arpaio. Opportunities to stoke
racism seem far too politically ex-
pedient for this president.
But for anyone serious about it,
including Trump, the road forward
is clear.
Ebony Slaughter-Johnson is an
associate fellow at the Institute for
Policy Studies who covers histo-
ry, race, and the criminalization
of poverty. Distributed by Other-
Words.org.
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