The United States Sentencing Commission just voted to let 46,290 federal prisoners apply to get out of prison sooner. The vote applied the Sentencing Commission’s latest reductions in federal sentencing guidelines, approved in April, to people currently serving sentences in federal prison for drug crimes.
Prisoners will begin to be released on November 1, 2015.
How many prisoners does this affect?
The Sentencing Commission estimates that 46,290 prisoners will be eligible to apply for shorter sentences under the new guidelines. That’s nearly half of all federal drug offenders — but when it comes to all prisoners in the US, it’s just a drop in the bucket.
A little over 20 percent of all inmates in federal prison are going to be able to apply for shorter sentences. (Nearly half of all federal prisoners are locked up for drug crimes, and nearly half of all federal drug prisoners are going to be able to apply for shorter sentences under this change.)
But most prisoners in the US are doing time in state prisons, not federal ones. Looking at the whole prison population of the US — at all levels — this change only affects about 3 percent of all prisoners in America.
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