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Comment by didgeoridoo | Hacker News Reader

For reference, as of January 2022 there were ZERO people in federal custody solely for simple possession of marijuana[0].

As a gesture, this seems fine. But the continued presence of cannabis on Schedule I makes an absolute mockery out of our entire code of laws.

[0]: https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/weighing-impa...

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But the pardon can allow those with convictions on their record to live a normal life.

Edit: major caveat, all the data harvesting and background check firms generally do not proactively purge their data sets as they’re supposed to. It’s your obligation to follow up with every single one of them individually, and there are a whole lot of them, they operate under the radar, and it’s hard to contact them. Finally it’s impossible to verify they actually did.

> Finally it’s impossible to verify they actually did.

Sounds like an opportunity for someone to set up a service which does. Do the verification I mean. :)

Sounds like an opportunity to sell snake oil, when you can't actually verify they're doing anything at all

Well you see, in the business of verifying someone's background it's really common to break the law and get way with it. The Verifiers are criminals themselves.

Hmmm, it's not really immediately obvious why that would be the case.

Are there some examples of this happening that you can point to? :)

Pardons don't expunge criminal records.

Expungement is a judicial remedy that is rarely granted by the court and cannot be granted within the Department of Justice or by the President.

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/frequently-asked-questions

>major caveat, all the data harvesting and background check firms generally do not proactively purge their data sets as they’re supposed to.

if they 'are supposed to' then it sounds like a potential civil liability if they have not done what they were supposed to do.

>It’s your obligation to follow up with every single one of them individually

or a lawyer could find some firms that did not do as they were supposed to, and some people that would have standing to sue, and ka-ching? This of course depends if my understand of "are supposed to" is correct.

> Just over 300 people — or 0.5% of the total prison population — are behind bars for any sort of drug possession. [1]

If anything it'll help some folks to have a their records cleaned up.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/bidens-marijuana-pardons-won...

I agree with your point.

But the quoted statistic is confusing. Under what specifics would 300 people = 0.5% of the total prison population? As I understand it, the total prison population of the USA is over 1 million, and the subset designated 'federal prisoners' is, by itself, over 200,000.

That 0.5% figure is wrong. It’s closer to 20%. (350,000 people) Here is a write up of many prisoner stats from 2023. See slideshow 3:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html

Note that terminology in this space is very important and subtle. 7 million people are arrested each year, and > 600K are sent to prison, but the total number of people in prison (and number that are incarcerated one way or another) is much lower than those numbers suggest. The total incarcerated population is about 1.75 million.

2% of the total population arrested each year sounds like a lot!

If we believe chatgpt, then the median time in prison is a couple of months.

I'm unsure about the math: "The arrival rate $\lambda$ is the rate at which people arrive in the queue, and the service rate $\mu$ is the rate at which people are served and leave the queue. In a stable system, the service rate must be greater than the arrival rate, otherwise the queue will grow indefinitely.

Given that the total number of people in the queue $n$ is 1750000 and the arrival rate $\lambda$ is 600000 people per year, we can find the service rate $\mu$ by dividing the total number of people in the queue by the arrival rate:

$\mu = \frac{n}{\lambda} = \frac{1750000}{600000} \approx 2.92$ people per year.

This means that on average, about 2.92 people are served and leave the queue every year.

The median waiting time in the queue can be calculated using the formula for the median of an exponential distribution, which is $\frac{\ln(2)}{\mu}$.

So, the median waiting time in the queue in years is $\frac{\ln(2)}{2.92} \approx 0.237$ years."

> 2% of the total population arrested each year sounds like a lot!

It's probably mostly people getting arrested multiple times.

But yeah, there's a lot of arrests where police in other countries would have just ID'd people and sent them on their way. Arrests are simply the default operating procedure in the US, which is likely related to the fact that the lack of reliable national ID makes it harder to identify people on the spot.

> If we believe chatgpt

We don’t. It’s usually not hard to source actual statistics (and when it is, that’s usually an indicator that ChatGPT is completely wrong).

I think most libertarians argue holds water that weed and dealing weed is a victimless crime. Now redo that with "how many people are in for dealing weed (and only weed) and other drugs" and that number goes way up. Obviously people found with guns and doing violence while selling drugs is another thing, no longer victimless. The War on Drugs is multidecade failure

Iirc the data is pretty crap and it’s hard to separate out specific flavors of what you think does or doesn’t deserve jail regarding drugs.

The Biden administration—HHS, specifically—has recommended rescheduling marijuana as a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act.

> "If the recommendation is approved, marijuana would no longer be listed as a dangerous substance like heroin or LSD and it would reduce or potentially eliminate criminal penalties for possession. The decision rests with the DEA, which has rarely, if ever, rejected a rescheduling recommendation from HHS."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthoban/2023/10/10/schedule...

The DEA is part of the "Biden Administration". One part of the administration- HHS, has made a recomendation to another part, the DEA.

Yeah I mean if Biden actually cared about it he could issue an executive order and have it rescheduled tomorrow whether the DEA wanted to or not. this is just a performative act. He is the chief executive ultimately its his decision to leave it as is of to reschedule it. if he doesn't then it means he doesn't care and anything less is just a performance for votes

> if Biden actually cared about it he could issue an executive order

The guy is President, not king. He's supposed to delegate those sorts of policy decisions to experts. Ruling by consensus, not fiat, is a _good thing_. It's like having a change advisory board or code review process vet changes before they get deployed in production.

The bit about performing for votes is a circular argument with no way to refute it. You could say the same thing about any elected official.

Sure, but thousands of people now have one less obstacle to passing a background check for a job, etc. I agree with you about the scheduling, but this is more than a gesture, and will have a material impact on a lot of people, especially in DC.

Not to mention makes it impossible to get a job at a company which has government contracts, because they require drug tests.

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