i drive over 50 miles a day and it s getting harder and harder. the politics of pot. no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana. the president pardons thousands. is it the first step toward nationwide legalization? inside politics, the biggest stories sourced by the best reporters now. welcome to inside politics sunday, i m abby phillip. control of the u.s. senate could well rest on the state of georgia. republicans can t be feeling good about their chances there after the week their candidate has had. days after a woman told the daily beast that herschel walker encouraged her and paid for her abortion in 2009, the new york times is reporting on friday that he wanted her to have a second abortion two years later. that time she told the new york times she refused. she has the baby who is now ten years old. that child is one of three children that walker had not acknowledged publicly until this year. quote, as a father, she told the time
this could impact whether they get housing, whether they get jobs and all of that. one thing still left on the table that a lot of marijuana criminal justice reform acts are told me about is there are still some 2700 non-violent cannabis offenders in federal prison. they ve been pushing the biden administration on that since the president took office. they re hoping some time next year the president moves on that. one of the interesting things about the moment we re in, to your point about biden s evolution, the country has made the same evolution. looking back to 1963, this is after he was elected to the senate, 19% said they supported legalizing marijuana. that number in 2021 up to 60%. part of it is because, take a look at what the country has been doing. it s pretty much legal or decriminalized in a lot of this country. when you look at the population
the tools police use. many of those tools were taken away from us even as the streets were being more unsettled with the homeless, increasing use of drugs, increasing violence. it s ironic in 2021 we re back where we started 50 years ago because the defund the police movement, abolish the police, the decriminalization that the criminal justice reform acts in many states such as new york, moving forward, i would argue they re moving forward too quickly and trying to reform too much, too quickly. lastly, we are once again deinstitutionalizing, but this time we re rapidly emptying out our prisons, too rapidly in response largely to the coronavirus. so new york is a perfect example of all three of those. fewer police. new york has lost several thousand police officers in the last year or so. the homeless population on the streets largely made up of the mentally ill and recently released prisoners out of our