Susan Jones serves up a particularly clueless bit of reporting in a July 16 CNSNews.com article:
As the number of heroin and cocaine deaths escalate in this country, President Obama is making the case that “non-violent drug offenders” should not serve long prison sentences — if they serve time at all.
[…]But as Obama calls for “criminal justice reform” that would send “low-level” drug offenders to drug courts and treatment programs instead of prison, the poison they peddle is taking a bigger and bigger toll on Americans.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug poisoning (overdose) is the number-one cause of injury-related death in the United States, with 43,982 deaths occurring in 2013, a 6 percent increase from 2012.
The number of drug-poisoning deaths involving opioid analgesics (prescription pain-killers) was 16,235 in 2013, a 1 percent increase over 2012; overdose deaths involving heroin totaled 8,260 in 2013, a whopping 39 percent increase from 2012; and there were 4,944 cocaine overdoses in 2013, up 12 percent from 2012.
Jones seems to be too busy suggesting that Obama is soft on crime to beaware of the contradiction she’s embracing: that the long prison sentences she seems to be arguing for have not stopped the growth in heroin and cocaine abuse.
Jones does another one of her snarky parenthetical insertions parading as “news”:
Nevertheless, Obama told the NAACP that locking up “low-level drug dealers” is robbing the nation of men and women “who could be workers and taxpayers, could be more actively involved in their children’s lives, could be role models, could be community leaders, and right now they’re locked up for a non-violent offense.”
(Of course, the same could be said of the many thousands of people who die from the heroin and cocaine they buy from “low-level” dealers. Had they lived, many of those people could also be workers and taxpayers, involved in their children’s lives, etc.)
Jones tends to sneer at Obama’s references to “low-level” drug dealers and huffed that “many” of the 46 people whose prison sentences Obama commuted were “cocaine or crack dealers.” But she downplays the disparity in sentencing laws that led to those “low-level” dealers getting disproportionately harsh sentences.
For instance, a man who was sentenced to life in prison without parole for dealing crack cocaine — a sentence he wouldn’t have received if he were dealing powder cocaine — had his sentence commuted to 20 years by Obama in 2013. He’s now working as a welder, as well as serving as a mentor for juvenile offenders. Apparently, Jones thinks he should have stayed in prison for life.
Jones also downplays Obama’s calls for such non-violent drug offenders to be diverted to treatment, since drug addicts often go on to commit crimes to feed their addiction.
But no — Jones is too committed to her employer’s anti-Obama narrative, in which the president is never allowed to look good. The fact that her reporting doesn’t make sense outside of that rather desperate hate-Obama narrative is of little consequence.