Obama Pardons 17

Our class discussions about racism and how it is present in the justice system sparked my interest in how apparent it really is in daily life. Although in class we talked about black protesters from the Civil Rights Movement getting sentenced to long prison sentences for trespassing, just recently Obama pardoned seventeen people for non-violent crimes. The crimes that the newly-pardoned people committed were far different from the "crimes" that protesters did during the Civil Rights Movement. But I think that it still shows that our country is at the very least trying not to make the same mistakes we made in the past.

Obama pardoned seventeen people recently after committing minor crimes from almost decades ago, such as "falsely altering a U.S. money order" or even "acquiring food stamps without authorization". I think that there is a consensus that these crimes are not big enough to the extent that the person who committed it is in jail for over a decade. That just seems outrageous. But that is a clear connection back to the CRM, when authorities would press charges on protesters for whatever charge they could press. For instance, since protesting was not a crime, they would charge them for trespassing on property.

But I don't think that pardoning people for acquiring food stamps falsely is anywhere on the same level as for protesting racial inequality. So although Obama is taking a step in the right direction by pardoning people for petty offenses, there is still a lot of work to be done to make the justice system equal.