Post by bohica9 on Oct 6, 2015 20:18:46 GMT -5
www.nydailynews.com/news/national/6-000-federal-prisoners-released-early-article-1.2387641
The El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma in July, when President Obama became the first sitting President to visit a federal prison in a push to reform the system.
As many as 6,000 federal inmates are going to be released early as the Justice Department tries to ease overcrowding in the nation’s prisons.
The majority are drug offenders who received punitive sentences over the past 30 years, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
The mass release from federal prisons — the largest in U.S. history — will take place between Oct. 30 and Nov. 2.
The bulk of the freed inmates will go to halfway houses or other stopovers before they are cleared for supervised release, The Post said.
The mass exodus was approved by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which lowered the maximum sentences for drug offenders in 2014.
It applied the change retroactively — setting up tens of thousands of inmates for early exits from prison.
The change in sentencing rules means that an estimated 46,000 of the country’s roughly 100,000 incarcerated drug offenders could get out early, The Post reported.
As many as 8,550 inmates would be eligible for release over the next year, starting next month, the paper said.
