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"Everyone in here is saying that only a black president would do something like this," Angel Ocasio, a Bronx native doing time at FCI Danbury for his involvement in a gang that sold drugs and killed people, tells VICE. "The prison system is full of blacks and Latinos that get shortchanged solely because the color of our skin and the neighborhoods that we come from."A second chance is the only thing most people in prison really want. I spent years looking out from inside the looking glass, fervently hoping that society would wake up and realize that the sentence I was serving was unjust. Which is not to say that people shouldn't be punished if they commit crimes, but that serving sentences of ten and 20 years for being involved in the drug game is not necessarily justice.Granting these prisoners some relief from their sentences is a tangible step in the right direction, and it's resonating across the prison-industrial complex."They say that this is history because it is the first time that America will release so many inmates back into society," Ocasio says. "But from the inside looking out, we are already part of history because we form 25 percent of the world's incarcerated."As the Post reported, the 6,000 inmates are the first slice of what could be as many as 46,000 people who get out early thanks to a change enacted last year by the US Sentencing Commission.
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