But Natasha wasn't sure just how hopeful she should feel. Like the four women pardoned by Clinton, her mother -- like tens of thousands of other women -- was sentenced to prison as a drug "conspirator," guilty of little more than having a man in her life who was involved with drugs. Clinton's decision to commute the five sentences received relatively little attention. There was no White House press conference and no press release.

Unlike his better-publicized grant of clemency to 12 Puerto Rican nationalists last year, which was perceived by some as an effort to win votes for Hillary Rodham Clinton in New York, Clinton's pardon of the drug "conspirators" appeared to have little or no political value as far as the White House was concerned. And political value is something that Dorothy Gaines and her daughter would understand. Political value has a lot to do with why Dorothy is in prison in the first place.

What the White House didn't say when Clinton ordered the release of Amy Pofahl, Serena Nunn, Louise House and Shawndra Mills is just how unremarkable -- and how political -- these women's cases are. This was not a case of a president extending clemency to prisoners whose convictions were reached in error or were uniquely unfair. Their convictions (and prison sentences) were completely routine under the federal conspiracy provisions passed as part of the mandatory-sentencing movement of the late 1980s.

In fact, mandatory sentencing and conspiracy provisions have contributed to a boom in the female prison population that is unprecedented in its scope, and devastating in its impact on children and families. Female prisoners are now the fastest-growing -- and least violent -- segment of the prison population nationwide.

According to a December 1999 report from the General Accounting Office, the number of women in prison has increased fivefold in the past two decades, from 13,400 in 1980 to 84,400 by the end of 1998. Between 1990 and 1997, the number of female inmates serving time for drug offenses nearly doubled; in the federal prison system, a staggering 72 percent of female inmates are serving time for drug offenses. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reports that 1,199 women were sentenced to federal prison on conspiracy charges in 1999, out of a total of 3,001 sentenced for drug trafficking in general. Given the length of the sentences mandated, that means that tens of thousands of women are in federal prison on charges similar to those of Pofahl, Nunn, House and Mills.

In its report, the GAO attributes much of the increase in the female prison population to "tough on crime" measures such as mandatory sentencing. Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project in Washington agrees; in his recent book, "The Race to Incarcerate," he blames a shift in philosophy about the purpose of incarceration -- from rehabilitation to punishment -- for the move away from indeterminate sentencing (10 to 20 years, 15 to life, etc.) to mandatory minimums.

Rehabilitation, after all, is a mysterious and unpredictable process: Who can say how long it will take? For that reason, says Mauer, a sentence intended to rehabilitate was seen to require some built-in flexibility. Once offenders began to be defined exclusively in terms of their criminal acts, and the function of incarceration came to be seen solely as deterrent and punishment, such flexibility was no longer required. Enter mandatory minimums.

The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, passed at the height of the crack epidemic and signed by President Reagan just a week before Election Day, established most of the drug-related mandatory sentences currently in effect. The 1988 Omnibus Anti-Drug Act upped the ante, adding mandatory sentences for simple possession of crack cocaine and changing the drug conspiracy penalties so that a co-conspirator faces the same penalties as the person who actually commits the offense.

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