The US Department of Justice prepares the release of 6,000 inmates of federal US prisons -the most ever provided so far. The measure is part of efforts to reduce overcrowding in detention and relieves penalty for convicted drug law that received heavy sentences for three decades.
The prisoners must be released between October 30 and November 2. Most of them will go to rehabilitation centers and house arrest before gaining supervised release.
According to the newspaper "Washington Post", the release follows the guidance of the US Sentencing Commission, an independent agency that sets the sentencing policies for federal crimes, which reduced the penalty for offenders future squarely on drug law last year. The change became retroactive.
The panel estimates that changing the rules for the conviction can result in the release of 46,000 of the approximately 100,000 accused of involvement with drugs. The commission estimates that over 8,550 prisoners would be eligible for release until November 2016.
The releases are part of the government's change in approach to criminal justice and sentencing in connection with drugs. To the commission, the Justice Department has instructed the country's prosecutors to not indict nonviolent offenders, who have committed minor crimes and unrelated to gangs or large drug organizations.
The change in sentencing policy evaluates the criminal history of the defendant, the type of crime, the use of weapon or the leadership of the accused in the incident. This assessment reduced the charges to two types, regardless of the type or quantity of drugs involved.
Because of long sentences and often compulsory, half of all federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses, although discuss is how many of them can be considered non-violent. Anyway, federal prisons account for only 14% of the country's prisoners, about 216,000 in 2013, the last year for which data were published. The state prisons housing the remaining 86%, about 1.4 million inmates.
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