When the judge didn't call, Phillip moved on. "Dear President Clinton," he wrote in March 1995, "I hope you can free my mom. I need her. Because I am just a little boy! I am just ten year old. I need my mom very much. Please get her out I need her."

Five years later, Phillip describes himself as "still holding on. I never did lose hope. I just thought they weren't interested.

"Words cannot explain how much I miss my mom," says Phillip, who belongs to a growing contingent of children orphaned by the drug war. The number of children whose mothers were in federal or state prison nearly doubled between 1991 and 1997, to 110,000. Most of these are the children of single parents; when mom is shipped off, they have no one left.

Because there are fewer state and federal facilities for women than for men, and because prisons are often built in remote rural areas, women are frequently sent hundreds of miles from their children. According to a 1997 survey of female state inmates by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than half the women had never received a visit from their children, mainly because of the cost and difficulty of travel.

Phillip went a year between visits before going to see his mother in May 1999 in a borrowed car. Natasha had saved up to buy a car so she could take her siblings to see their mother, but the transmission went and she can't afford to fix it, so Phillip does not know when he will see his mother next.

The fact that his mother was convicted when he knows her to be innocent, Phillip says, has made it difficult for him to hold onto the values with which he was raised. "At the time, it made me feel like right was just wrong," he says. "I learned that no matter who you are and what you did, people don't really care. If somebody says you did this, they're gonna go by that. It's not right. I hope they just quit the conspiracy laws sooner or later."

Phillip is far from alone in that hope. New York, which launched the mandatory-sentencing craze in 1973 with the passage of its Draconian Rockefeller drug laws, is now reconsidering those laws. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., has introduced legislation in Congress that would repeal most federal mandatory-sentencing provisions. The American Bar Association, the U.S. Sentencing Commission and over three-quarters of the federal judges compelled to impose the sentences have all come out against mandatory-sentencing laws. Even drug czar Barry McCaffrey has publicly criticized them.

Despite the lack of attention to Clinton's recent pardons, Eric Sterling of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation sees them as "a very important action. I am hopeful that Clinton is going to pardon, between now and when he leaves office, hundreds if not thousands of people," he says. While Clinton has so far been stingy with his power to pardon and commute sentences, Sterling notes that, historically, presidents have used that power much more routinely -- President Kennedy, for example, pardoned hundreds of people convicted under the drug laws of the 1950s.

"The president's duty, expressed in the Constitution, to assure that laws are faithfully executed also creates a duty to correct injustices," says Sterling. "Just as the president is given the power to veto acts of Congress, the power of the pardon is one that can correct improper legislation -- which is the case here -- improper acts of the judiciary or improper acts by prosecutors.

"I'm hopeful that these pardons will begin to send the instruction to assistant U.S. attorneys around the country that their zealous pursuit of minor offenders is offensive to the president's sense of justice and the proper execution of the laws."

So far, however, the Clinton administration has shown little inclination to take on the laws under which the four pardoned women were sentenced. According to Sterling, the federal prison population has doubled during Clinton's tenure. The number of female prisoners has risen even more quickly during that period than has the number of male prisoners. If Clinton did nothing but sign clemency orders for the remainder of his term, he wouldn't come close to reversing this trend.

One can only hope that the commutations represent not a single feel-good gesture but the beginning of a much-needed reconsideration of mandatory-sentencing policies. Ideally, Clinton's action would signal a change similar to the one currently taking place around the death penalty, where the redress of specific injustices has led to widespread recognition of systemic problems.

In the meantime, Phillip Gaines has a more limited aspiration. "I was just thinking," he says, "that after he released four women, maybe he could release four more women. Maybe my mom."

Order "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood" from the editors of Mothers Who Think.