Prison Reform it is
Miracles never do cease.
I’m pretty sure when I started writing at Red State I was ADAMANT that I would never be writing a thumbs up story about these three things together, Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian and anything.
Well, I am here to say, I am happily wrong.
As was covered here last week by Jim Jamitis Not The Onion: Kim Kardashian And Jared Kushner Meet At The White House To Tackle Prison Reform Kim Kardashian used her street cred to get a meeting with the President of the United States, Donald Trump.
Nothing unusual here in the current climate we live in, two reality T.V. stars just meeting for a quick chat. Really. You know President Obama would have done the same.
The topic was prison/sentencing reform and if you have been paying attention to our country the past decade you might have noticed the United States likes to incarcerate a LOT of people.
According to the Sentencing Project
The United States is the world’s leader in incarceration.
There are 2.2 million people in the nation’s prisons and jails—a 500% increase over the last 40 years. Changes in law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain most of this increase. The results are overcrowding in prisons and fiscal burdens on states, despite increasing evidence that large-scale incarceration is not an effective means of achieving public safety.
Enter Alice Marie Johnson, a first-time nonviolent drug offender who has served a sentence of 21 years for trying to buy cocaine. That’s right, she tried to buy it for selling purposes and has been jailed for two decades.
The meeting between President Trump and Kim Kardashian last month Ann Marie’s case was brought up as a possible commutation of her sentence and today president Trump did just that.
A statement from the White House announcing the commutation said this ( via Via CNN )
“Ms. Johnson has accepted responsibility for her past behavior and has been a model prisoner over the past two decades. Despite receiving a life sentence, Alice worked hard to rehabilitate herself in prison, and act as a mentor to her fellow inmates,” the White House said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.
“While this Administration will always be very tough on crime, it believes that those who have paid their debt to society and worked hard to better themselves while in prison deserve a second chance,” the statement added.
I personally am thrilled that this lady is now being given a second chance at life. How we can imprison people for this amount of time and look the other way is baffling to me for non-violent crimes.
While I am not generally a fan of anyone named Kardashian on this occasion I truly am grateful that Kim took the time to take up this cause and used her “fame’ to get this in front of a person who could do something about it.
I am hopeful that President Trump continues down the path of prison and sentencing reform and helps to set this nation on more reasonable guidelines for incarceration.
The real crime would be to continue throwing people away like Alice Marie Johnson over antiquated rules and guidelines.
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