As stated by a former Federal Prosecutor, Ministry of justice ought to inform the public about the decision of former President Barack Obama early release 1 715 prisoners.
“The Ministry of justice headed by attorney General Jeff Sessom now need to track down hundreds of former prisoners who received these pardons and the commutation of sentence, said former Federal Prosecutor bill Otis (Bill Otis). — Indicators of recidivism for drug crimes already account for 77%, and I think we on this account have good ideas. But society must have specific information. How many of these guys commit another offence, what is the nature of these new offences, if there are violent crimes, how many people suffered from them (including drug addicts and victims of drug overdose)?”
But only the Ministry of justice has staff and access to the real information needed in order to Refine and analyse the adopted at the last minute and behind closed doors the decision to release a record number of convicts (1 715) who have returned to American cities and neighborhoods. At least one organization has tried to assess the impact of the pardons and amnesties by President George W. Bush; but she had to hire three analysts, who gathered only part of the information that is available from the Federal government, and which it is not willing to share.
After January President Donald trump has taken some steps to increase transparency of Federal agencies. For this, he forced different entities to disclose information about crimes committed by illegal immigrants. According to Otis, this is a good example of what I have to do officials with information about reducing Obama prison terms.
“I guess it makes sense to establish a standard or interdepartmental Supervisory body that the public receives reasonable access to data for which it pays”, in accordance with the rules of confidentiality, said the expert on public policy matters Ricain Jason (Jason Richwine), the study of state statistics to analyze policy alternatives. “When the government publishes only selective statistics from data with limited access, we get answers only to those questions which the government considers important. But it’s not necessarily the questions, the answers to which will (or should) know the society,” he said.
“Greater transparency is almost always good for the Federal government, said Otis. — Because of the enormous size of the Federal government to the citizens it is difficult to understand what is happening.” He further said:
The Federal government should not only be more transparent. It should also be more readily publish data on crime. Because the current procedure of the publication of the data is extremely slow, the liberals managed for many months if not a year, to deny the fact of rising crime that began in the end of 2014, and speak scornfully of this fact as “individual facts” about the “alarmist stories”.
In January, when Obama was preparing to leave the White house, he said that no growth of crime there, although in 2015 and 2016, the number of dead Americans has increased by 1 500 people.
While being protected by a ban on publication of government information that could discredit its denials, Obama has exercised its authority and reduced the sentences 1 715 criminals, including traffickers of deadly drugs.
Many of those who received pardons and shortening are also violent criminals. For example, Obama commuted the punishment repeatedly convicted drug dealer, who was convicted for his involvement in the murder of Tiffany. Now Sherman ray Meirovitz (Sherman Ray Meirovitz) in June will return to the streets instead of serving his life sentence. In March, Obama released a Virginia dealer of cocaine, taken with arms in his hands, and also a drug dealer from Philadelphia and dealer of methamphetamine from California who were also armed.
His decision to release a large number of prisoners Obama justified the racial disparities in the criminal justice system. “At the moment the punishment is serving approximately one out of every thirty-fifth African American, and every eighty-eighth Latino,” said Obama, speaking at the 2015 National Association for the advancement of colored people. He went on to say:
As for non-violent crimes related to drugs, we need to reduce mandatory for today long prison terms — or completely abandon them. We need to give judges some leeway in determining penalties for non-violent crimes, so we can put on the right way made a mistake young people. We have this year to push through Congress a bill to reform sentencing. You need to prosecutors at its discretion, appoint the best, in their opinion, the punishment will be the most effective, but not long. We should think about alternatives to prisons, for example, on the courts, considering cases about drugs and about treatment programs and probation.
The Obama white house said that 60% of people held in Federal prisons is blacks and Hispanics; but he did not disclose very important details.
Allegations of racial bias influenced the debate in Congress about crime in 2015 and 2016, when Obama and his assistants tried to pass a Law on the reform of sentencing and the punishment (Sentencing and Corrections Reform Act), which seriously reduced the minimum sentences for drug traffickers.
But the wording of the bill went far beyond the small number of people convicted of drug offences. Sessions, occupying the position of attorney General in may 2016 was noticed in the Federal courts “almost no cases of simple possession”. Almost all, or 99.5% of those incarcerated in Federal prisons for so-called “non-violent drug offenders” convicted of drug trafficking. A bill stuck in the Senate as the group of Republican senators, including Tom cotton (Tom Cotton) from Arkansas, and Marco Rubio (Marco Rubio) from Florida, came out publicly against him and the presidential candidate Donald trump during election campaign promised “law and order”.
Faced with irrefutable data, Obama went the other way, trying to reduce the number of inmates in Federal prisons.
“As often happened, Obama just took the law into their own hands. If Congress believed that the original drug laws too strict, he could, by law, to give retroactive effect to any a more lenient sentence, explained Otis. But he didn’t, and efforts to adopt reforms of sentencing just disappeared. Unhappy that the Congress refused to accept its proposal to protect criminals, Obama began to act unilaterally”.
Now that Obama commuted and pardoned 1 715 prisoners, his actions will have far-reaching consequences, you are warned about Otis:
I think these mass pardons Obama will have two lasting effects. First, there was a signal that we will no longer seriously punish traffickers, and that the real problem is the unnecessary callousness of America and its punitive tendencies (and racism?), and not what the dealers are indifferent to the people whose lives they are destroying by trying to earn them fast money.
Another long-term consequence is that at least the last ten years an increasing number of heroin overdoses. Why do we become so lenient with drug dealers at a time when the threat of drug abuse has reached shocking levels, it is a mystery, a puzzle and a mystery.
Obama showed leniency to criminals, despite the fact that in 2014 from a drug overdose claimed more than 47 million Americans, including 28 647 overdose of synthetic opioids, and the number of deaths from heroin overdose in the period from 2010 to 2015 tripled. The center for control and disease prevention found that from 2000 to 2014 from a drug overdose died 500 thousand people. The figure is staggering.
Parole criminals is very difficult to watch, especially when the state does not want to publish, and even to gather important statistics, explained to Breitbart News, the experts of this field.
In circumstances when clear and detailed state statistical data are not available, activists and critics of state policy have to rely on data from third-party studies, indirect information and unreliable statistics, which are often embellished anecdotal cases.
The Ministry of justice should undertake an analysis of the leniency, comparing the composition of the prisoners, which was a shortened period, the current composition of the convicts in the prisons and the population as a whole. Unfortunately, much of the required data, nobody is going. But statistics sometimes raises more questions than it answers.
For example, compiled annually by the FBI based on 18 thousand different sources statistical reports on the state of crime in the country, there are five racial categories: white, black or African Americans, American Indians and Alaska natives, Asians, Hawaiian natives and other Pacific islanders. In the category “white” includes all Hispanics — and the number of Hispanics in the United States in 2015, approximately 57 million people. If so to blur the lines between racial and ethnic groups, to get the full picture it will be very difficult.
Since almost the entire consumption in the United States heroin are imported across the border by Mexican drug traffickers, who almost without exception, illegal immigrants, Obama’s action on mitigation of punishment there is the immigration aspect. But there are many uncertainties because of the confusion in the statistics collected by the Federal authorities.
For example, in the recent report of the Cato Institute (CATO Institute) argues that the new program trump’s VOICE no longer justified, as immigrants commit fewer crimes than Americans. “Our main conclusion is that among legal and illegal immigrants prisoners is much lower than among natives of the United States: 0,85%, 0.47 percent and 1.53 percent respectively,” says the report’s author Alex Nowrasteh (Alex Nowrasteh).
However, there is another study entitled “Immigrants-criminals: the number, demographic composition, countries of origin”, which are based on extrapolations from “the study of American community” (American Community Survey) and not on the data of the Ministry of justice. This lack of data from the Ministry of justice leads to distortions in the Cato Institute report because its authors could not know how many migrants were deported before they could commit another offence, as do many of us repeat offenders, permanently residing in the country. Problems of this Association of immigrants and Americans can be reduced if the Federal government is expected to publish data showing the percentage of foreign criminals in prison in the first sentence. However, notes Nowrasteh, no such data in the “Research community” and in the databases of the Bureau of the census. “If you have them, please share them,” he says.
Organization ProPublica has tried to study the patterns of pardons (not commutations of sentences), approved by President George Bush. She acknowledged that the relevant data in the Ministry of justice do not exist, and did a great job involving the two authors and three researchers, after extensive analysis of data. The study showed that 494 was filed the petition, but partially or fully approved a total of 189. Basically pardoned detainees from among the white collar, but narcocriminals among the pardoned were very few.
“The consequences of these variables did not eliminate the strong effect of race on receiving a pardon. After checking all the available variables, we found that whites in General get a pardon almost four times more frequently than minorities”, — stated in the report for 2011. There are also explanations of the difficulties caused by the lack of public information of the Federal bodies.
President Bush has acted almost exclusively on the recommendations of the division of pardons included in the structure of the Ministry of justice. Thus, these data allow us to assess the impact of this division on the final decision on clemency.
By submitting an application on the basis of the Law on freedom of access to information, ProPublica got the list of people who were denied clemency for two presidential terms of Bush. The list includes 1 729 names. The website of the division of pardons placed the names of the 189 applicants who have been pardoned. ProPublica made based on the General list a random sample of 500 names…
ProPublica staff and freelance analysts have studied the trial record and other information on these people, and established telephone communication with them to collect data on age, race, sex, and marital status. The researchers collected data on convictions in the archives of the Federal courts on the basis of the Law on freedom of access to information, and also searched for other information about bankruptcy, mortgage deductions, judicial decisions on financial issues and other things that concerns the criminal record of the selected people.
We conducted the analysis using the binary logistic regression. The dependent variable was received or no applicant a pardon. We checked all other variables, comparing them with the outcome of the case. In the end, the analysis included the following variables:
• race,
• the number of years from sentencing to filing of the petition,
• crime
• the verdict,
• gender, marital status,
• whether the bankruptcy petitioner,
• whether the petitioner’s lien, whether imposed against him/her of the decision,
• did the applicant his crime while in military service,
• sent if an elected official a letter to attorney on issues of pardon on behalf of the applicant…
In most archives of the Federal courts and prisons of Latin American applicants are called white. To highlight in their sample of Latinos, we relied on Spanish names and data on race from other documents…
According to experts, the habit of States to hide the source data is complicated by a political debate.
When the government makes its data available to the public, people can better understand existing patterns and available information, told Breitbart News criminal expert Heather MacDonald (Heather McDonald). She said:
Blacks make up 53% of the total number of people who police stop on the streets, but black in the composition of the urban population is only 23%. The naive observer, this discrepancy in the police may seem racist. However, it is necessary to know that blacks commit 75% of shootings in new York and 70% of robberies. Conversely, white accounted for 34% of the population, but they commit less than two percent of crimes with the shootings and less than four percent of robberies. White make up nine percent of the number of people whom police stopped on the streets for inspection. So it turns out that blacks are stopped less than their rates of crime, and whites more often.
Additional knowledge helps to find solutions in the public debate on issues such as the rate of arrests in relation to racial characteristics.
“An important misconception anti-police activists is that they ignore one important fact. Police work today is based on the statistical data and the police are directed to where people are most likely to become victims of crime. And it is a minority areas. But people have no idea about how large the differences in crime rates, says MacDonald. — The Federal government can lead in informing the public about police activity and crime”.
As regards the problems of immigration, the Federal government is hiding data on the extent of the programs for migrant workers such as H-1B. And yet it hides data about the owners of green cards, says Stephen Box (Steven Camarota), working as Director of studies at the independent Center for the study of immigration (Center for Immigration Studies). Similarly, the Federal government is very careless about data repatriation. The box adds: “so the Obama administration has exaggerated the figures for deportations”.
The Federal government has data from States on the number of illegal immigrants in American prisons, but it only publishes information about the total number of hours per year spent by prisoners of the number of illegal aliens behind bars. These data are published in the Federal reports on the financing of the state prisons, where illegal foreigners.
“When Arizona says that foreigners last year held in its prisons a million hours, this is not enough — the Box told Breitbart News. — We need to know what is the percentage of the total number of hours and prisoners. Without the so-called micromodular data we cannot perform the analysis”.
“I would like to know the different categories of people among those arrested — the Director of political studies Centre for the study of immigration Jessica Vaughan (Jessica Vaughan), — How many people with refugee status? How many have a green card? And they don’t even tell us how many are behind bars non-citizens. I know they can do this breakdown, because I’ve seen this in the past.”
The Department of homeland security must disclose a lot more information which it keeps under lock and key, says Vaughan. “Among other things, it is necessary to publish information on the number of exemptions to illegal foreign nationals from prisons immigration and customs enforcement, the number of people who catches and releases border service, the number of people who came to study on exchange, but working instead of studying. The number of people who came to training… and what “training” they are. It should also publish statistics on foreigners convicted of terrorism.”
For example, the Ministry should publish the data “Federal tax service for tax reporting people that provide two different identification numbers… How many times data on income are recorded under reusable numbers… the number of employers gives information about the social security numbers used by a few employees,” said Vaughan.
The Ministry of education should collect and publish data about how private universities consider applications of people of different race and ethnicity, says the President of the equal opportunity Center (Center for Equal Opportunity) Roger Clegg (Roger Clegg). “But private universities reluctantly reveal this information”, — he told Breitbart News.
While the Federal government decides to collect and publish accurate data on crime in seeking the truth about the released dangerous criminals the Americans will remain ignorant.
“Data on Obama’s pardons and commutation of their sentences are particularly useful, and the reason is quite simple. He issued pardons in record numbers, far more than any other President since Eisenhower, and perhaps earlier, told Breitbart News Otis. — Why? Probably to find out the truth, we need to examine the facts. Perhaps during the Obama presidency are behind bars in Federal prisons was much more harmless and innocent people. But if so, let’s lay the facts on the table”.
“To determine the reason for this unprecedented relief Obama, society (and the press if she actually is interested in this) it would be useful to have more information explaining the decision to release and reduce time,” he said.
“And another thing. Liberals often say that we need “policy based on data.” But they rarely welcomed the emergence of such data,” added Otis.
