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What’s the End Game for the Trigger Warning Movement?

by Ilariaujg Posted on May 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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“Trigger warnings” are having their 15 minutes of fame this year, and a New York Times piece about them this weekend made the rounds of the blogosphere. Apparently some activists want trigger warnings for books like The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn:

Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.

The warnings, which have their ideological roots in feminist thought, have gained the most traction at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the student government formally called for them….Bailey Loverin, a sophomore at Santa Barbara, said the idea for campuswide trigger warnings came to her in February after a professor showed a graphic film depicting rape. She said that she herself had been a victim of sexual abuse, and that although she had not felt threatened by the film, she had approached the professor to suggest that students should have been warned.

Ms. Loverin draws a distinction between alerting students to material that might truly tap into memories of trauma — such as war and torture, since many students at Santa Barbara are veterans — and slapping warning labels on famous literary works, as other advocates of trigger warnings have proposed.

Maybe somebody can help me out here. Not snarky “help,” mind you, but real help. As you might expect, I’m not especially sympathetic to the trigger warning movement, which seems more appropriate for explicitly safe spaces (counseling groups, internet forums, etc.) than for public venues like university campuses. But put that aside. What I don’t get is what anyone thinks the point of this is. You’re never going to have trigger warnings in ordinary life, right? So even if universities started adopting broad trigger policies, it would accomplish nothing except to semi-protect sensitive students for a few more years of their lives, instead of teaching them how to deal with upsetting material.

Now, you could make this same argument about a lot of things. But in other cases—for example, a university policy aimed at racism or disabilities or whatnot—it would presumably be done in the hope that it might influence public policy and eventually lead to changes in the wider world. But does anyone have this hope for trigger warnings? It doesn’t even seem feasible to me.

But maybe I’m just demonstrating a lack of imagination here. In any case, I’m curious about what the ultimate point is. Are supporters of trigger warnings just hoping to give kids a few more years of refuge from the outside world? Or do they somehow think that these policies might spark the outside world to change? I’ve never really heard anyone explain what the end game is here, and I’d like to hear it.

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What’s the End Game for the Trigger Warning Movement?

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North Carolina GOP Pushes Unprecedented Bill to Jail Anyone Who Discloses Fracking Chemicals

by VanA79ngqbcu Posted on May 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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As hydraulic fracturing ramps up around the country, so do concerns about its health impacts. These concerns have led 20 states to require the disclosure of industrial chemicals used in the fracking process.

North Carolina isn’t on that list of states yet—and it may be hurtling in the opposite direction.

On Thursday, three Republican state senators introduced a bill that would slap a felony charge on individuals who disclosed confidential information about fracking chemicals. The bill, whose sponsors include a member of Republican party leadership, establishes procedures for fire chiefs and health care providers to obtain chemical information during emergencies. But as the trade publication Energywire noted Friday, individuals who leak information outside of emergency settings could be penalized with fines and several months in prison.

“The felony provision is far stricter than most states’ provisions in terms of the penalty for violating trade secrets,” says Hannah Wiseman, a Florida State University assistant law professor who studies fracking regulations.

The bill also allows companies that own the chemical information to require emergency responders to sign a confidentiality agreement. And it’s not clear what the penalty would be for a health care worker or fire chief who spoke about their experiences with chemical accidents to colleagues.

“I think the only penalties to fire chiefs and doctors, if they talked about it at their annual conference, would be the penalties contained in the confidentiality agreement,” says Wiseman. “But the bill is so poorly worded, I cannot confirm that if an emergency responder or fire chief discloses that confidential information, they too would not be subject to a felony.” In some sections, she says, “That appears to be the case.”

The disclosure of the chemicals used to break up shale formations and release natural gas is one of the most heated issues surrounding fracking. Many energy companies argue that the information should be proprietary, while public health advocates counter that they can’t monitor for environmental and health impacts without it. Under public pressure, a few companies have begun to report chemicals voluntarily.

North Carolina has banned fracking until the state can approve regulations. The bill introduced Thursday, titled the Energy Modernization Act, is meant to complement the rules currently being written by the North Carolina Mining & Energy Commission.

Wiseman adds that, other than the felony provision, the bill proposes disclosure laws similar to those in many other states: “It allows for trade secrets to remain trade secrets, it provides only limited exceptions for reasons of emergency and health problems, and provides penalties for failure to honor the trade secret.”

Draft regulations from the North Carolina commission have been praised as some of the strongest fracking rules in the country. But observers already worry that the final regulations will be significantly weaker. In early May, the commission put off approving a near-final chemical disclosure rule because Haliburton, which has huge stakes in the fracking industry, complained the proposal was too strict, the News & Observer reported.

For portions of the Republican-controlled North Carolina government to kowtow to the energy industry is not surprising. In February, the Associated Press reported that under Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, North Carolina’s top environmental regulators previously thwarted three separate Clean Water Act lawsuits aimed at forcing Duke Energy, the largest electricity utility in the country, to clean up its toxic coal ash pits in the state. Had those lawsuits been allowed to progress, they may have prevented the February rupture of a coal ash storage pond, which poured some 80,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River.

“Environmental groups say they favor some of the provisions in the Energy Modernization Act,” Energywire reported Friday. “It would put the state geologist in charge of maintaining the chemical information and would allow the state’s emergency management office to use it for planning. It also would allow the state to turn over the information immediately to medical providers and fire chiefs.”

However, environmentalists point out that the bill would also prevent local governments from passing any rules on fracking and limit water testing that precedes a new drilling operation.

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North Carolina GOP Pushes Unprecedented Bill to Jail Anyone Who Discloses Fracking Chemicals

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Finally, the NYPD Will Stop Seizing Condoms from Suspected Sex Workers

by KathiIvest Posted on May 13, 2014

Mother Jones

The New York Police Department announced this week that its officers would stop seizing unused condoms as evidence of prostitution, which is a significant win for public health advocates. Because prostitution charges rarely go to trial, advocates have long argued that the main consequence of arresting suspected sex workers for carrying condoms is to discourage protected sex—and sabotage efforts to bring down the rate of HIV/AIDS.

On Monday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed. “A policy that inhibits people from safe sex is a mistake and dangerous,” he said. “And there are a number of ways you can go about putting together evidence without condoms.”

Still, New York police may continue to use condoms as evidence for arrests in sex trafficking and promotion of prostitution cases, which civil rights and health advocates say leaves a huge loophole in the law. And the practices of counting condoms as evidence of a crime or confiscating them remain widespread in urban centers across America, with devastating health effects.

Police departments in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco all use similar tactics, even as these cities spend millions distributing free condoms and trying to protect sex workers at risk for contracting or transmitting HIV. In these cities, a 2012 Human Rights Watch report found, “Police stops and searches for condoms are often a result of profiling, a practice of targeting individuals as suspected offenders for who they are, what they are wearing and where they are standing, rather than on the basis of any observed illegal activity.”

The best example of this practice gone wrong may be New Orleans. Civil rights advocates there blame aggressive police tactics—including the seizure of condoms—for Louisiana’s staggering HIV/AIDS rate. A December Human Rights Watch report found that “sex workers, transgender women and others at high risk of HIV infection told us that they were afraid to carry condoms and that they sometimes had to engage in sex without protection out of fear of police harassment.” Partly as a result, the state’s infection rate is twice the national average.

The problem, the report continues, is not just that criminalizing condoms makes people less likely to carry them. Arresting individuals on such a thin premise guarantees that people at a high risk for contracting or transmitting HIV/AIDS get arrested a lot. This interferes with their medical treatment. “One transgender woman was arrested for prostitution 10 times in three years, and has yet to keep her appointment with the clinic,” the report states.

The New York general assembly and the California legislature are both pushing measures to ban the use of condoms as evidence across the state. Health advocates across the country have vocalized their support for these bills, but their merits may be best summed up by Maria, a sex worker in San Francisco who spoke to Human Rights Watch in 2012: “Why is the city giving me condoms when I can’t carry them without going to jail?”

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Finally, the NYPD Will Stop Seizing Condoms from Suspected Sex Workers

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You Should Put New Tires on Your Car Every Once in a While

by JaimeLockett Posted on May 13, 2014

Mother Jones

This is hardly the most important topic in the world, but this story from ABC News sure left me scratching my head:

American tire companies have helped to defeat proposed laws in eight states that would require inspection of tires for age….”We oppose legislation that have some sort of age limit on tires,” said Dan Zielinski, executive director of the Rubber Manufacturers of America.

In the most recent case, the trade group spent $36,000 on lobbyists to defeat proposed legislation in the state of Massachusetts that would have included the age of tires on regular vehicle inspections, according to ABC News’ Boston affiliate WCVB, which joined other top ABC News affiliate investigative teams around the country in a national hidden camera investigation into tire safety.

….For consumers, determining the age of a tire can be a daunting task. The date of production can be found in a unique code at the end of 11- or 12-digit identification number on the tire’s sidewall. But instead of the standard month/year display, the tire industry uses a week/year display. For example, a tire produced in early June of 2010 (in the 21st week of the year) would be displayed as 2110, instead of the more common 06/10 that most consumers are accustomed to seeing.

“They did not want to put a date code on tires, specifically because they did not want to give the impression that tires might actually have a service life,” said Kane, the safety consultant.

OK, but why do tire manufacturers oppose the idea that tires have a service life? Wouldn’t a recognized service life lead to more tire sales? I can think of dozens of industries that have successfully run ad campaigns urging consumers to replace items more often than they’re accustomed to, with the goal of selling more stuff. So what’s the difference here?

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You Should Put New Tires on Your Car Every Once in a While

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Will American Pot Farmers Put the Cartels out of Business?

by DaniloPoirier Posted on May 7, 2014

Mother Jones

For the first time ever, many of the farmers who supply Mexican drug cartels have stopped planting marijuana, reports the Washington Post. “It’s not worth it anymore,” said Rodrigo Silla, a lifelong cannabis farmer from central Mexico. “I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization.”

Facing stiff competition from pot grown legally and illegally north of the border, the price for a kilogram of Mexican schwag has plummeted by 75 percent, from $100 to $25, the Post reports:

Farmers in the storied “Golden Triangle” region of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, which has produced the country’s most notorious gangsters and biggest marijuana harvests, say they are no longer planting the crop…increasingly, they’re unable to compete with US marijuana growers. With cannabis legalized or allowed for medical use in 20 US states and the District of Columbia, more and more of the American market is supplied with highly potent marijuana grown in American garages and converted warehouses—some licensed, others not.

As notes David Downs of the East Bay Express, this is a really big deal. In the past decade, Mexican drug cartels have murdered an estimated 60,000 people. The DEA annually spends more than $2 billion to deter the transport of illicit drugs across the border. “So now we have both the DEA and cartel farmers screaming bloody murder about legalization,” Downs points out. “Sounds like we’re on the right track.”

Of course, the American pot boom is also creating problems of its own, with some Mexican traffickers moving north to California and other states to set up vast “trespass grows” on remote public lands. To be sure, the illicit market for weed will prop up criminal syndicates for as long as pot remains illegal, yet this week’s news is some of strongest evidence to date that legalizing and decriminalizing pot will ultimately make everyone safer.

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Will American Pot Farmers Put the Cartels out of Business?

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Tom’s Kitchen: Fried-Egg Taco With Fried Snap Peas and Radish Flowers

by LaurenMussen Posted on May 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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To garden is to accept chaos. Soil, seeds, weather, fauna—these are just a few factors that interact in complex and unpredictable ways, generating results we can influence but ultimately can’t control. Add the frailty of human judgment to the mix, and gardening is a kind of crapshoot. For the kitchen gardener, when the harvest disappoints, you have to react creatively—in short, to turn your errata into something delicious to eat.

This spring here in Austin, we planted snap peas too late. The tendrils gamely snaked their way up their trellises, but by the time the plants flowered, the weather had become too hot for the buds to set much in the way of fruit. Something similar happened with the radishes, planted on the same late date: They grew robust tops, but very few of them had sufficient time to develop full root bulbs before the heat set in. Harvesting them became a low-odds gamble: for every four you picked, just one presented a crunchy, spicy red orb. The other three showed a spindly root, earning a trip straight to the compost pile.

Well, not always. For a couple of weeks, the radish tops have been so green and healthy that I’ve been sautéing them like I do kale or chard. They cook fast and have a pungent flavor, easing the sting of the largely failed root harvest. Then the remaining radish tops went to seed and sprouted pretty purple flowers. When I snapped off a bud and tasted it (in the garden as in the kitchen, one should Always Be Tasting), I found it peppery, reminiscent of mustard greens (a related plant) and tender. And so, another unexpected harvest—for several days, I’d go out to snip a few to add, chopped, to salads.

Finally this weekend, the time came to pull out the lingering spring garden, removing the pea and radish plants from the garden to make way for new crops. (I put in a second round of tomatoes, hot peppers, melons, and cucumbers.) As I uprooted the pea shoots, I noticed a few more remaining snap peas than I expected. I tasted one. It delivered a burst of sweetness and the bright flavor that I can only describe as “green”—the thing that makes sugar snap peas maybe the most beloved spring vegetable. The problem: The pod had become slightly wizened in the hot sun, a bit too fibrous and impossible to chew all the way. Nothing that a bit of cooking won’t fix, I noted as I snatched a couple of handfuls worth of delicious-but-tough snap peas out of the foliage.

Then I snipped all the remaining flowers from the radish plants before yanking them, too. Among the roots, I collected more keepers than I had expected. I immediately brought my motley treasure into the kitchen for a quick breakfast. (Note: these ingredients would also work well in a stir fry or a pasta.) Of course, you probably don’t have access to aged snap peas or radish flowers; but if you garden, I bet there are some exciting flavors lurking out there in odd places, waiting to be liberated.

Fried-Egg Taco With Fried Snap Peas and Radish Flowers

Makes 1 taco

1 radish, chopped (garnish)

1 clove of garlic, crushed, peeled, and chopped fine
A good handful of slightly tough sugar snap peas, stem ends removed, and chopped coarsely
A good handful of radish (or other brassica) flowers, chopped coarsely
Olive oil
Sea salt
A pinch of crushed chili pepper
Black pepper
Red chili pepper

1 quarter-inch slice of butter (cut from a stick of it)
1 egg
Sea salt
Black pepper
A pinch of crushed chili pepper

1 tortilla (I use whole-what ones from Margarita’s Tortilla Factory of Austin)

Heat a cast-iron or other heavy-bottomed skillet over medium flame. Add enough olive oil to cover the bottom and stir in the garlic, the chili pepper, a pinch of salt, and a grind of pepper. Stir for a minute, being careful not to let the garlic burn. Add the snap peas and toss, cooking them for a minute or two. Add the radish flowers. Cook, tossing and stirring, until the snap peas are tender (they should retain a decent crunch). Marvel at the interplay between the sweet peas and the mustardy radish flowers.

Meanwhile, place a small skillet over medium heat and add the butter. When it has melted, swirl the pan to coat. Let the pan get good and hot. Crack an egg and add it to the pan. Give it a dusting of salt, black pepper, and chile pepper. Turn heat to low and cook until whites are fully set. Flip the egg and cook to desired doneness (I like the yolk to be a little runny.

Meanwhile, heat the tortilla in yet another small skillet or comal (or over the open flame of a gas burner) over medium heat, flipping it to brown on both sides.

Assemble the taco: Slip the fried egg into the folded tortilla and enough of the radish-flower/snap pea mixture to fill it. Serve the remainder on the side. Garnish with the chopped radish.

P.S.: Happy 40th Anniversary to my beloved Watauga County Farmers’ Market on the opening of the new market season. I’m delighted the two young landless farmers who have joined Maverick Farms’ FIG Program were able to sell edible brassica flowers at their very first market—here’s hoping for a great 2014 season to all the High Country farmers, and welcome aboard Kathleen Petermann with Waxwing Farm and Caroline Hampton with Octopus Gardens!

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Tom’s Kitchen: Fried-Egg Taco With Fried Snap Peas and Radish Flowers

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Should We Step in to Help Nigeria Find Kidnapped Girls?

by y0afvun Posted on May 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Two weeks ago, 234 Nigerian girls were kidnapped from a boarding school in the country’s northernmost state of Borno by the al Qaeda-linked group Boko Haram. Today, most of them are still missing, and Nigerian lawmakers are calling on the international community to step in to help the rescue effort.

“Nigeria should seek international help,” says Rep. Eziuche Ubani, who sits on the country’s house of representatives’ committee on defense. “The Nigerian armed forces are not in a position to defeat the insurgency in the northeast.”

The schoolgirls were captured during a predawn raid on April 15 in the town of Chibok by members of Boko Haram, which the Obama administration recently designated as a terrorist organization. The group, whose name means “Western education is sinful,” believes the Nigerian government has been corrupted by Western ways. In an effort to return the country to the pre-colonial days of Muslim rule, the group has terrorized the country over the past four-plus years, targeting schools in many of its killing sprees, and attacking churches, military checkpoints, highways, the UN building, and, recently, a bus station in the capital city of Abuja.

Though the abduction happened weeks ago, international press coverage of the missing girls has shot up in recent days after Nigerians criticized the foreign media’s initial silence on the issue and launched the Twitter hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has vowed to rescue the girls, but two weeks after the kidnapping, many of the victim’s parents are losing faith in the government’s efforts, especially as reports have emerged that many of them have since been married off to the Boko Haram militants.

“Nigeria has one of the best armed forces” on the continent, says Kyari Mohammed, a professor of security studies at Modibbo Adama University of Technology in northern Nigeria, “but they are not trained for asymmetric warfare.” The militants disguise themselves easily amongst their fellow Nigerians in Borno, and often escape to bordering countries or hideouts in the dense northern forests.

So elected officials in the country are calling for outside aid. The government must do “whatever it takes, even seeking external support to make sure these girls are released,” Nigerian Sen. Ali Ndume told the Associated Press Wednesday. His colleague, Sen. Bukola Saraki, tells Mother Jones the international community should lend a hand to Nigeria in the same way it did to families of the victims of missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

The US gives about $1 million a year in aid to the Nigerian military and soon plans to start training Nigerian special forces to fight the insurgency in the north, but American forces would not be able to enter the country to help search for the kidnapped girls unless Nigeria officially requests that the US do so. A spokeswoman for the US State Department says that the department is “in discussions with the Nigerian government on what we might do to help support their efforts to find and free these young women.”

Not everyone buys into the argument that Nigeria needs outside help. “What has happened to the girls is not what is beyond the capability of the Nigerian security forces to handle,” says Mausi Segun, a Human Rights Watch researcher based in Borno state. “The reports we’re getting out of the North is that nothing much is being done on the part of the security forces. They are not using information provided to them by residents and locals in that region.” Parents have been searching the forests near Boko Haram camps in the north on their own for over a week, but they can only do so much, as they are in danger themselves of being killed by militants. Segun says the Nigerian military should make a good faith effort to find the girls before asking for international help.

The Nigerian military doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to stemming attacks by the Islamist militants. Jonathan has promised to defeat Boko Haram, but the insurgency has become bloodier than ever over the past few months. One reason for that, Ubani says, is that the military does not coordinate with security forces in the countries that border Borno state—including Chad, Cameroon, and Niger—where Boko Haram members have been known to hide out. And the Nigerian military’s expenditures are not tracked, Mohammed explains, so even though the country spends about $6 billion a year on its military, it is hard to determine how much of that money goes toward fighting Boko Haram and how it’s used.

Human rights advocates contend the military is not only ineffectual, but that Nigerian security forces’ response to the insurgency, including the indiscriminate killing of northern Muslim men, is worsening Boko Haram violence. The terrorist group has killed some 5,000 Nigerian men, women, and children since it emerged in 2009. In the the first few months of 2014, it has already killed 1,500 people. Boko Haram has abducted school children before, but this time the scale is unprecedented.

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Should We Step in to Help Nigeria Find Kidnapped Girls?

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What Did We Learn from Abu Ghraib?

by HolleyJaynes Posted on April 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It’s mind-boggling. Torture is still up for grabs in America. No one questions anymore whether the CIA waterboarded one individual 83 times or another 186 times. The basic facts are no longer in dispute either by those who champion torture or those who, like myself, despise the very idea of it. No one questions whether some individuals died being tortured in American custody. (They did.) No one questions that it was a national policy devised by those at the very highest levels of government. (It was.) But many, it seems, still believe that the torture policy, politely renamed in its heyday “the enhanced interrogation program,” was a good thing for the country.

Now, the nation awaits the newest chapter in the torture debate without having any idea whether it will close the book on American torture or open a path of pain and shame into the distant future. No one yet knows whether we will be allowed to awake from the nightmarish and unacceptable world of illegality and obfuscation into which torture and the network of offshore prisons, or “black sites,” plunged us all.

April 28th marks the tenth anniversary of the moment that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were made public in this country. On that day a decade ago, the TV news magazine “60 Minutes II” broadcast the first photographs from that American-run prison in “liberated” Iraq. They showed US military personnel humiliating, hurting, and abusing Iraqi prisoners in a myriad of perverse ways. While American servicemen and women smiled and gave a thumbs up, naked men were threatened by dogs, or were hooded, forced into sexual positions, placed standing with wires attached to their bodies, or left bleeding on prison floors.

Thus began America’s public odyssey with torture, a story in many chapters and still missing an ending. As the Abu Ghraib anniversary nears and the White House, the CIA, and various senators still battle over the release of a summary of a 6,300-page report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Bush-era torture policies, it’s worth considering the strange journey we’ve taken and wondering just where we as a nation mired in the legacy of torture might be headed.

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What Did We Learn from Abu Ghraib?

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Report Shows Renewable Fuels Support 852,000 Jobs and $46 Billion in Wages for America’s Workers

by Posted on April 24, 2014

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Report Shows Renewable Fuels Support 852,000 Jobs and $46 Billion in Wages for America’s Workers

Posted 24 April 2014 in

National

WASHINGTON, DC — The Fuels America coalition today released an economic impact study by John Dunham & Associates showing the far-reaching benefits of renewable fuels for America’s workers and the U.S. economy – including supporting more than 850,000 American jobs.

Renewable fuels now represent nearly 10% of America’s fuel supply and have helped reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil to the lowest level in years. The analysis takes into account the entire supply chain for renewable fuels and quantifies the impact to the U.S. economy, including:

Driving $184.5 billion of economic output
Supporting 852,056 jobs and $46.2 billion in wages
Generating $14.5 billion in tax revenue each year

The full analysis is publicly available on the Fuels America website, including localized reports for every state and every congressional district in the country .

The report tells the story of an innovative, advanced renewable fuels and biofuels industry that is producing growing benefits for America’s economy. “The data are in: The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is driving billions of dollars of economic activity across America,” the report concludes. “This is the result of years of investment by the biofuel sector to bring clean, low carbon renewable fuels to market.”

Embraced by both Democrats and Republicans and signed into law by President Bush – but bitterly opposed by the oil industry – the RFS calls for the use of American-grown renewable fuels in our transportation fuel supply. The oil industry is urging the U.S. EPA and/or Congress to repeal or weaken the RFS so that renewable fuels do not further reduce oil industry market share.

Fuels America stands with the thousands of farm families, workers, small business owners, environmental advocates, veterans and military families who submitted comments to the U.S. EPA urging the agency to protect the Renewable Fuel Standard and support the development of clean, homegrown American fuels.

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Report Shows Renewable Fuels Support 852,000 Jobs and $46 Billion in Wages for America’s Workers

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Meet 5 of the Low-Level Drug Offenders Obama Could Set Free. There Are Thousands More Like Them

by ChadwickCampa Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice announced that thousands of federal inmates serving time for certain non-violent crimes will soon be able to apply for clemency.

Those eligible to be set free will be prisoners convicted of low-level nonviolent crimes—mostly drug offenses—who have already served 10 years of their sentence, don’t have a significant criminal history, and are serving out a sentence the would likely be shorter had they been convicted for the same crime today. The rule change could apply to some 2,000 of the 200,000 inmates in federal prison, and is part of a wider effort by the Obama administration to make sentencing laws more fair. Last year, the DOJ changed sentencing guidelines to give judges the freedom to determine whether or not to apply mandatory minimums for certain drug charges.

Here are five federal prisoners who will be eligible for clemency under the DOJ’s new rules (via Families Against Mandatory Minimums):

Weldon Angelos: Angelos is serving 55 years for selling a few pounds of marijuana while in possession of a gun. In his early 20s, Angelos founded a successful Utah-based rap label called Extravagant Records, where he wrote and produced songs with artists like Snoop Dogg. In 2002, the Salt Lake City police, who suspected Angelos was part of a local gang, arranged for an informant to purchase marijuana from him. The informant claimed that Angelos had firearms with him during both buys. When the judge in the case was forced to sentence Angelos to a mandatory 55 years, he called the punishment “unjust, cruel, and even irrational,” noting that repeat child rapists and airplane hijackers get shorter sentences.

Sherman Chester: Chester is serving life without parole for selling cocaine and heroin as part of a drug ring. Chester started selling small amounts in his 20s and soon got involved in a drug conspiracy headed up by a family friend near Tampa, Florida. After an undercover detective bought from him on several occasions, Chester was indicted in federal court in 1992 along with nine others involved in the ring. He was 25. Chester was sentenced as if he had been in possession of nearly the entire amount of heroin and cocaine found on all members of the conspiracy. The judge who meted out Chester’s harsh punishment said, “This man doesn’t deserve a life sentence, and there is no way that I can legally keep from giving it to him.”

Sharanda Jones: Jones is serving life without parole for allegedly leading a drug ring. After high school, Jones worked as a restaurant manager and cosmetologist. Unable to support her family on her income, she began selling coke and crack in the Dallas area. In 1999, at age 32, Jones was found guilty of taking part in a conspiracy to sell crack, and sentenced to life. Jones received such a harsh sentence because she allegedly carried a gun when she went to buy cocaine from her supplier; because the court considered her a “leader” of the ring; and because she claimed innocence. Her co-conspirators got sentences that ranged between five and 19 years. Jones’ daughter, who was eight when Sharanda went to prison, is now an adult.

Barbara Scrivner: Scrivner is serving 30 years in federal prison for participating in a drug ring. Scrivner was molested as a child, and later fell into drugs and a string of abusive relationships. At age 26, in order to make ends meet, Scrivner started selling small amounts of meth as part of a drug ring. The other participants in the conspiracy were arrested in 1992, but Scrivner initially was spared because she only played a bit part in the ring. A year later, after she refused to testify against the other members, Scrivner was indicted and held accountable for 109 kilos of meth. Once behind bars, Scrivner plunged into depression and attempted suicide by jumping from a 40-foot prison building. She survived, and has since undergone rehab.

Timothy Tyler: Tyler is serving a mandatory life sentence for selling LSD. After high school, Tyler traveled around the country following the Grateful Dead, doing drugs, and being hospitalized for mental health problems. He was arrested a couple of times for selling. In 1992, Tyler sold LSD and marijuana to an informant, and was later charged with possession and conspiracy to distribute along with three other codefendants, one of whom was his father. Partly because of prior convictions, Tyler went to prison for life, while his codefendants only got five to ten years. His father died serving out his term.

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Meet 5 of the Low-Level Drug Offenders Obama Could Set Free. There Are Thousands More Like Them

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