US-current President Barack Obama started his clemency initiative since 2014. This initiative was aimed to release some of the prisoners or commute their sentences, especially those that were imprisoned over the past three decades due to the war against illegal drugs/drug abuse. On Monday, the president granted 78 pre-Christmas pardons and 153 commutations.

According to USA TODAY, despite having very few days left in office before the next President-elect Donald Trump takes charge, Obama has kept pushing his clemency act, this time doubling the number of people to which pardons and commutations were given compared to his previous years while in power. The number has now reached 1,176 federal prison inmates whose sentences were commuted by Obama mostly for long, mandatory-minimum drug.

Drug policy Alliance worries that the next occupant of the president's Office might not be too sympathetic. Michael Collins of the Drug Policy Alliance was reported saying that the alliance needs the president to pick up the pace so that he can finish dealing with the clemency applications before leaving office.

Since President Harry Truman, President Obama has done more acts of Clemency compared to his recent predecessors, with most of these clemencies occurring during the last year as president. A known pardon expert P.S. Ruckman Jr. calls this act "the greatest last-minute surge in history."

As reported by Afr, compared to other presidents whose list of pardon contained political allies and even relatives, Barack Obama states that all pardon requests must go through the application process as required. Among the 1,937 pardon petitions and 13,042 commutation applications, looks like Hilary Clinton who was the former secretary of state and Edward Snowden who was National Security's Agency contractor have not applied.

Now considering the promise that the US president Barack Obama made before that the number of pardons will be roughly same with other previous presidents, he still has a long way to go since President George W. Bush pardoned about 189 people while President Clinton pardoned around 396 people.