“Last July, President Obama announced, in a video message, that he was commuting the sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders in federal prison. Not since the Johnson administration had so many sentences been commuted in a single day. It was a small corrective, Obama said, to the “inequities in the criminal-justice system” and the unnecessarily harsh sentences with which these men and women had been saddled. He had already commuted 30 such sentences the previous winter and has since kept going: The latest 42 grants of clemency, announced by the White House two weeks ago, brings the total to 348. More than a third of these prisoners were serving life sentences, often with no possibility of parole.”