Like most things Washington, D.C., not all political moves are what they appear to be. When President Obama became the first sitting president in U.S. history to
visit a federal penitentiary in mid-July, he highlighted the inequities of American sentencing practices and the damage that felony convictions do to the lives of those who receive them. Obama spent a week discussing the need for reform of the prison and federal justice system, and
today his administration announced a limited program that would extend Pell Grants to prisoners for use in paying for college classes.
During his visit to the penitentiary, the president noted that nearly half of America's prisoners are incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses, and he ended the week by commuting the life sentences of 46 convicted drug offenders.
But if the Obama administration is serious about reforming America's severely broken justice system, one of the biggest steps the administration could make is to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I drug under DEA rules to a lesser schedule III based on the guidelines that the DEA sets forth for schedule drugs.
With an increasing number of states legalizing the sale and distribution of marijuana for recreational purposes, and the potential clash with the Federal rules that such a move entails, many experts have been calling for and predicting that his administration would reclassify marijuana to ease the conflict between state and federal laws. It would be a smart move both structurally and politically, since doing so under the umbrella of prison reform would make the move about Justice and easing over-crowding in our prisons rather than about promoting drug use.