This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 17, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama has commuted the sentences of dozens of federal inmates convicted of drug charges,

but he's making speeches that mass incarceration is a big

problem.

What the president is short on is answers, even though the president has broad latitude to both

commute sentences and pardon convicts.

Adam Bates is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

He comments.

Well, probably the best thing we can say about it

is it's the president's highlighting that there is a problem here.

It's a very public acknowledgement that there's a problem in the criminal justice system

that we have too many people in prison and that the people we have in prison are spending too much

time there especially the people who were convicted of of nonviolent offenses.

But as you said this is 46 out of roughly 95,000 federal prisoners on drug charges.

So we still got a long way to go, but this is a good signal from the president that there's a problem here.

The president has the power to do a lot more of this, to read the headlines.

Yes, this is a large number of commutations to be given at once, but they're not pardons.

And this president has been relatively stingy with pardons.

So when we evaluate the powers of the president when it comes to fixing individual

cases of injustice in criminal justice system, this seems pretty small.

Yes, it's important to understand that under the Constitution, the President has what's

called plenary power to pardon, which means accepting cases of impeachment,

...