A Cruel and Stupid Scheme

By Kevin Ring

The Biden administration floated a trial balloon yesterday that deserves to be destroyed by a drone.

For months, FAMM and other advocates have been urging the administration to make clear that the 4,000 people sent to home confinement during the pandemic would not have to return to prison if they continued to follow the rules. Clemency, we said, would be the best tool at the president’s disposal.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that administration officials are considering recommending clemency only to those people who were convicted of drug offenses and who have less than four years left on their sentences. I imagine the people who came up with this “compromise” thought it was a responsible and politically savvy compromise. I think it’s cruel and stupid.

FAMM has been fighting precisely this kind of arbitrary line-drawing for 30 years because justice does not come in cookie-cutter form. Saying that people with less than four years left are eligible, but that those with four years and a month are not, is the same idiotic thinking that brought us mandatory minimums. Justice requires individualized review and an understanding of context.

Kendrick Fulton would be ineligible for clemency under the proposal because he has several years left on his sentence. But isn’t it worth considering before tearing him away from his family again that he already served 17 years in prison (on a 30-year crack charge), has been home without incident for a year, earned his commercial driver’s license, and now drives a truck for Coca-Cola?

The administration’s leaked plan would send Chad Ducey back to prison, too. It doesn’t matter that Chad served three-and-a-half years of his seven-year sentence behind bars, has been home and employed for the past 16 months, and promised his two young children — based on assurances he was given when he was sent to home confinement — that he wouldn’t have to go back to prison.

Chad’s sin? He committed the wrong type of crime. The administration apparently is a-okay with reincarcerating hundreds of people, including parents like Chad, if their illegal conduct involved finances and not narcotics.

None of this makes sense to me. Even the administration’s claim to want to focus on “nonviolent drug offenders” is pure rhetoric, as the administration must know. The only people sent to home confinement under Attorney General Barr’s guidance were those who did not have any violence in their record. In other words, everyone on home confinement was already judged nonviolent.

Everyone on home confinement who has followed the rules should be granted clemency. Their wardens and case managers never told them they would have to return. They have done everything society could have asked of them. Sending any of them back will serve no public safety purpose and will only cause damage to people and families who have endured enough.

Don’t pop this trial balloon. Obliterate it.

Kevin Ring is FAMM’s president.