US to Free 6,000 Prisoners

The United States will set free 6,000 people serving prison time for drug convictions in one of the most concrete and dramatic actions the country has taken as it seeks to shrink its prison population, which is the largest in the world.

The releases will take place between Oct. 30 and Nov. 2 and many of the released will first live in halfway houses, or facilities where drug addicts and freed prisoners can get reacclimated to the wider world, according to The New York Times.

The releases have not yet been formally announced by the U.S. Justice Department, which oversees the federal prison system from which the inmates will be released. The release was first reported by the Washington Post.

The move comes on the heels of changes made in April by the United States Sentencing Commission, which reduced the punishments for a number of nonviolent drug crimes. Some of the changes were made to be retroactive, and at the time it was reported that nearly 50,000 inmates could be affected by the revisions.

There is also an effort afoot in Congress to repeal or amend many of the mandatory minimum sentences that were put on the books at the height of the drug war. These created sentences that had to be enforced no matter the circumstances of the crime, and made it impossible for judges to judge cases on their merits.

These laws were often discriminatory as well, as the penalties for crack cocaine, which were predominantly used in poor, minority communities, were much greater than for powder cocaine, which was used by the affluent. This is despite the fact that they are essentially the same drug with differences in only how they are prepared and consumed.