Many advocates of criminal-justice reform believe in maximum gun control, yet the White House press releases on the president's commutations have been silent on the widespread incidence of illegal gun possession. It would seem that once someone becomes a member of the oppressed prisoner class, the gun issue becomes irrelevant.

The Justice Department press release also does not reveal the offenders' criminal history, history of violence, ties to drug cartels, or the sentencing judge's recommendation. Written requests to the president from federal attorneys to make the process more transparent have gone unanswered. 

Now let's say that you are an elderly widow in Harlem and you want to go out to buy some tea. There is a drug dealer on the corner trafficking cocaine. He has a pistol in his waistband. Do you feel safe? Does it reassure you that the dealer is not actually shooting people at the moment? Or is his very presence there part of an implicit reign of violence that the drug trade exerts over your life, eroding your sense of security?

The latter is the case, to judge from the routine pleas to the police from law-abiding inner-city residents. These good people beg their local commanders to get the dealers off the corner once and for all; they would scoff at the distinction between violent and nonviolent drug traffickers. They understand that the drug trade is underwritten by the implicit threat of violence.

We have been told endlessly by President Obama and the rest of the justice-reform movement that prisons are chock-full of harmless sad sacks whose only offense is getting caught with a little weed. It should have been easy, therefore, to come up with thousands of pacific targets for commutation or pardon. That so many of recipients of Obama's clemency were armed and dangerous shows how distorted the dominant narrative about "mass incarceration" is.