WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Between October 30 and November 2, the US Bureau of Prisons will allow 6,000 convicts to be transported to halfway houses and home confinement before being placed on supervised release.
Some 1,764 of the released prisoners — more than 25 percent — are non-US nationals who will be handed over to the Immigration and Customs Service and deported back to their countries of origin.
President Barack Obama set up a Sentencing Commission as an independent agency of the judicial system that decided in 2014 to reduce drug sentences by an average of two years and make the reductions retroactive.
The Commission has said it is considering giving early release to as many as 46,000 more prisoners, including some who used violence while committing drug-related crimes.
In another effort, the US Senate is considering a new bipartisan prison reform bill called the Safe, Accountable, Fair, Effective Justice Act (SAFE).
The measure would replace the current "three-strike law" that sends criminals to life in prison after being convicted of three crimes.
Critics charge that the law has needlessly sent many minor and usually harmless criminals to jail for life un-necessarily, and that it is also an incentive for violent criminals to kill as they believe they would face a life term for lesser crimes.
The SAFE legislation has been introduced to the House of Representatives, but it faces conservative opposition and has not yet been approved.
The United States has the largest prison population in the world, and about half of all inmates are in jail on non-violent drug-related offences, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.
In total, 2.2 million Americans are in jail and another 4.5 million are on probation or parole.
