Revolving-door prison not the solution for drugs

President Obama's recent commutation of 111 inmates from prison certainly sounds noble enough. After all, many of these felons do have families and in many cases their crimes were having a drug possession over the legal limit to qualify as a felony. But in retrospect, many were not. Some having drug dealer quantities in the several pounds area.

Additionally, I would like to believe that the justice system and judges in particular take into account prior records and circumstances. For the vast majority of these individuals, this was not a one-time thing. There likely was a bad legal history in many of their cases.

But here is the complication, and it is a big one: Over 70 percent of these same people will be charged with another felony within three years and will commit one in less that a year. That is the sad reality of the recidivism rate.

The drug problem in America is at epidemic proportions. Simply having a revolving door for these individuals is a step backward. Unless these individuals have been completely cleaned of drugs and the drug families that created this plague, they do not have much of a chance in the outside world, particularly if they are moving right back to the environment that got them there.

A good example, or more correctly, a bad example is Dwyane Wade's cousin, recently shot in Chicago by two individuals who had a combined nine felony gun charges against them in drug-related gangs.

Innocent people being killed should not be the price of fiat commutation.

Richard Francke

Bartlett