you knew damn well who I was thinking of!
Haley Barbour on his pardons of Mississippi prisoners
By Haley Barbour
January 18, 2012
Haley Barbour, a Republican, was governor of Mississippi from 2004 to 2012.
The furor over the pardons I recently granted as governor of Mississippi initially focused on numbers. I would like to set the record straight.
People thought — incorrectly — that I had let 215 prisoners out of jail because the secretary of state reported that many people received clemency.
In fact, 189 of those people were not released from prison. In most cases, they had already been out for many years. These folks are no more a threat to society now than they were the week before I gave them clemency.
I believe in the governor’s power to grant clemency, but I granted fewer than 10 pardons or reprieves in my first term as governor. After Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, my staff just didn’t have time to deal with the issue, so at the end of my first term I pardoned only the inmates who had worked successfully at the governor’s mansion that term.
This was not a new thing. For decades, Mississippi governors have granted clemency to the inmates who work at the mansion. I followed that tradition four years ago and did so again at the end of my second term. No one should have been surprised.
Despite all the publicity this month, few seem to notice the limited scope of my recent actions. I authorized the release of 26 prisoners from custody. As of last week, there were 21,342 inmates in the state corrections system and 60,517 people under Mississippi Department of Corrections supervision. I released 12 one-hundredths of 1 percent (0.0012) of our state’s inmates. About 95 percent of the clemencies I approved were recommended by our state parole board, and I accepted the parole board’s recommendations about 95 percent of the time.
When people realized that only 26 prisoners were being released — and that half of those 26 were given suspended sentences for medical reasons — the political attacks on my pardons shifted. The story became that many of the 13 non-medical releases were murderers. Of those 13, only 10 were pardoned; the other three were put under house arrest or a revocable, indefinite suspension.
All this public noise, then, boils down to 10 inmates — in particular, the five who worked at the governor’s mansion during my second term.
