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The United States of America accounts for about 5% of the world's population, but its jails hold nearly a quarter of the world's prisoners. That population has increased by 800% in the past three decades as various waves of crime have ravaged America's cities. But many of those behind bars have never been charged with an act of violence. As of 2011, 47% of the people incarcerated by states had been convicted of nonviolent drug, property and public-order crimes.
The great lockup has taken its toll. The federal prison system alone costs $6.5 billion a year, and the criminal-justice system that feeds it is rife with racial and economic inequities. Black men have a 32% chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives, compared with a 17% chance for Hispanic men and a 6% chance for white men. And when they are caught, black men are likely to serve longer sentences--an average of 20% longer than white men for the same crimes, according to one estimate by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. The effect of this sweeping policy of incarceration has distorted many American families and communities. In Florida, 1 in 10 adults doesn't get a ballot because of past convictions. Among black adults, who tend to vote Democratic, 1 in 13 nationwide doesn't get a ballot--in some states, including Florida, it's 1 in 5 .
To date, Obama and Holder have for the most part only tinkered around the edges. A recent academic study suggested Holder's latest round of prosecutorial guidelines would result in lesser sentences in about 500 drug cases a year, out of a universe of roughly 15,000. And eight commutations is a tiny fraction of the 8,000 or more convicts still serving time under outdated crack laws. But statistics may not be the best measure of reform's impact. "It's not a huge deal practically but a huge deal symbolically," says Ohio State University law professor Douglas Berman, who writes a popular blog on federal sentencing. "It will ripple through not just the federal criminal-justice system but the state criminal-justice systems."
In the summer of 2013, while they both vacationed on Martha's Vineyard, Holder remembers warily letting Obama read an upcoming speech he was going to give on Justice Department efforts at reform. In it, Holder declared the longer sentences for black male offenders "shameful" and described a need for a "fundamentally new approach" to crime and punishment. "It's a gutsy speech," Holder remembers the President telling him. Yet after the speech was delivered, there was almost no backlash. Groups as disparate as the ACLU and the Cato Institute criticized the Justice Department for not going further.
The pace of reforms can be expected to quicken, which would be welcome news to lifers like Hernandez. For a time, he would spend as many as eight hours a day in the prison law library searching for some error in his sentence that could set him free and sharpening his own petition for commutation. Through the process, he became a go-to person in Oklahoma's El Reno Federal Correctional Institution for others seeking to file appeals and seek clemency. Since December's announcements, Hernandez says, there has been a clear shift in how inmates approach the process. "People who thought they were going to die in prison now believe they are not," Hernandez wrote in an email. "It has turned nonbelievers of the Lord into believers."