One sure way Biden can push Trump into a corner using Jan. 6
To really make a dent in the country's overflowing prison population, hard decisions about who gets punished will have to be made.
As 2022 came to a close, President Joe Biden issued pardons to six people, leading to a collective shrug from experts and the media. The country’s leading experts on pardons have called out the president for his “cowardice” in granting mercy to only a handful of the over 130,000 federal prisoners. It is time for Biden to answer his critics by making a real dent in the country’s swollen prison population and foreshadowing the types of hard choices it will take to end mass incarceration.
He can do this by issuing clemency to thousands of nonviolent federal prisoners and including within that group some of the people convicted in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
By commuting the sentences of some of the nonviolent Jan. 6 rioters, Biden would push his primary critic, Donald Trump, into a corner.
As many reflect on the atrocity that unfolded in Washington two years ago today and the way it struck at the core of our democracy, that may be a preposterous thought. To be very clear, this is not to say that the people who were trying to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power do not deserve to be punished. Like many of the others who would receive clemency, they do.
But one of the challenges of reducing prison populations will always be that many people in the U.S. want to see lots of people locked up. We just differ about which people. To substantially reduce our incarcerated population (people in prison and jail), which totals almost 2 million and is among the highest in the world, the country needs to accept that the end of mass incarceration would mean less punishment, even for people who (we think) deserve it and even for those who commit serious crimes.
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