Posts Tagged‘politics’

What We Can Learn About Politics from the Current Presidency

A lot of people didn’t believe that Donald Trump could be president and many of those who trusted that he would secure the presidency have been waiting for him to fail. Donald J. Trump is different in that he had no practical political experience before becoming president, but he did find a way to make himself a very polarizing figure. He challenged the legitimacy of President Obama by questioning his birth certificate. Trump made himself very attractive to a core group of voters well before he announced his intentions to run for the presidency. Students attending the highly esteemed George…

Understanding the Sentencing Reform Act

The 5-year mandatory sentence given to those with as little as 5 grams of crack cocaine – the same mandatory sentence given to those with 500 grams of powder cocaine – was considered unfair. The disparity causes a lot of African-Americans involved in non-violent drug-related cases to serve the same amount of sentence as Caucasian, violent offenders. This disparity was reformed by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, reducing the 100:1 ratio all the way to 18:1 in an attempt to provide fairer sentencing. According to experts from the online criminal justice program of Portland State University, however, the 18:1…