NOW IS THE TIME TO LIBERATE BLACKS FROM PRISONS

A new study by the Pew Center has just confirmed something we have
known for quite a while. The United States went on an incarceration
binge in the first Bush and Clinton administrations that now finds
America holding one-quarter of all the prisoners in the world. It
says that one of every 100 Americans is in jail, while one in every
nine Blacks are there, with one of 15 Blacks between the ages of 18-39.

Whether it is that America is embarrassed or, in the case of some
politicians, see that the "tough on crime" era did not amount to
crime reduction, or financial savings, or added safety, this approach
to the drug epidemic did not work. And while 66 percent of crack
cocaine users are White, policing drugs led to policing blacks,
resulting in the fact that 80 percent of those locked up are for
petting drug offenses.

Now it seems that there is a developing mood in the Congress among
both Democrats and Republicans that something should be done. Rep.
Bobby Scott (VA) has introduced HR 5035, a bill that is supported by
the NAACP and other groups to reduce the sentences for possession of
crack cocaine.

The bill would eliminate the added penalties for cocaine base use,
eliminate the mandatory minimum sentence associated with it and use
the savings for drug treatment and counseling. Scott recently held
hearings that featured an array of people, from a black former drug
dealer, a judge, an NIH official, a state official and others who all
agreed that the disparities in cocaine sentencing together with
mandatory minimums has failed.

As I listened to the hearings, I remembered the era of the late 1980s
and early 1990s, when each and every politician running for office
was obliged to show that he or she could be tougher on crime than the
other person.

In fact, what transpired before our eyes was a discussion about race,
justifying the long sentences given blacks, suggesting that since
crack cocaine fostered violence in their neighborhoods severe
punishment would cure the problem.

Now, more than one million imprisoned Americans later, we know that
not only has it not worked, it has created bloated state expenditures
on jail construction rather than schools, leading to the need for
intensified policing to fill the jails and in the process provide
the cheap labor for prison industries associated with them.

But I also remember that in 1997, Rep Maxine Waters called on then
President Bill Clinton to provide $5 billion in construction money
for dilapidated schools and to ease the drug sentencing guidelines
for power and crack cocaine.

But while Al Gore advocated equalizing the penalties before an
organization of black Journalists, the Trotter Group, Bill Clinton
clung to the belief that the impact of violence associated with the
drug trade was a justification for keeping some inequality between
the drugs.

This weak rationale associated with sentencing that was never fully
vetted, since both drug crack and power influenced black and white
communities dramatically in some way.

So, even as Supreme Court justice Stephen Steven Bryer and other
lower level judges rebelled against the use of mandatory minimum
sentencing as unfair and racially biased, and the Sentencing
Commission recommended equalization to the Clinton administration,
Rep. Waters received neither the $5 billion, nor the drug
equalization change from Clinton. She had a special reason of course,
because it was her district that was flooded by the importation of
crack in the mid-1980s, as a result of the Reagan administration
inspired Iran-Contra scandal where the CIA used money from the drug
sales to finance the war against the Contras in Nicaragua.

In this election, there is perhaps no greater issue for the black
community than liberating as many of its members as possible that
were legislated into prison by the anti-crime craze of an earlier
era. What makes it appear to have been an action taken against the
black community is fact that an FBI report in 1998 indicated that
serious crime had been declined for the 7the consecutive year.

Now in the early 21st Century, the jury is still out why the Clinton
administration, aware of the disparate racial impact his 1994 Crime
Control act and targeting policing were having upon blacks who were
incarcerated, their families and their future, could hold the
position that the black community suffered more from the violence
associated with the crack cocaine trade.

Nevertheless, it raises the question now of the judgment has been
exercised by Hillary and Barack Obama on the decision to equalize
drug sentencing and eliminate Mandatory Minimums. This decision could
also save lives and since there are more Blacks in prison than in
Iraq, it is also more important.

Dr. Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director of
the African American Leadership Center and Professor of Government
and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park.