Hawthorne wrote: The public is despotic in its temper. (Meaning: When morally outraged the public will support extreme measure for an instant remedy of a social ill.)
Recently President Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 46 non-violent drug offenders. Then at the NAACP annual convention he said, “Long mandatory minimum sentences that are in place should be reduced—or discarded entirely.”
“Low-level drug dealers,” Obama continued, “Owe a debt to society, but not a life sentence or a 20 years prison term.”
Historian Michelle Alexander has referred to long mandatory minimums as “The New Jim Crow” and stated, “The drug war was motivated by racial politics…it was launched as a way of trying to appeal to poor and working class White voters, as a way to say, “We’re going to get tough on them, put them back in their place.”
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