IN LINE ON CRACK

The U.S. Justice Department has issued new guidelines under which
inmates serving unfair sentences for crack cocaine violations are to
be released. Hundreds of inmates in several other states have gone
free. But in North Carolina, which has one of the highest number of
such cases in the nation, the wheels turn slowly.

Just a handful of eligible crack offenders -- 27 to be exact -- had
been released by mid-April.

The state chapter of the NAACP properly is pushing for faster action
by North Carolina's federal courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in December that federal judges could
impose less-stringent sentences for crack violations than set by the
U.S. Sentencing Commission, and the commission later voted to shorten
sentences retroactively for inmates punished under the old standards.

In a tough-on-crime push in the 1980s, Congress imposed harsher
penalties for crack offenses compared with those involving powered cocaine.

Low-income African-Americans were more often caught with crack.

White suspects, often in a better position to hire good lawyers, were
more likely to be arrested with the pricier powered form of the drug.
Even when they were convicted, their sentences were lighter.

Yet both versions of the drug are a scourge. Certainly drug
violators, including those involved with crack, whose crimes include
violence should be held to a harsher standard. But the sentencing
disparity when the violations were comparable neither made sense nor
was fair. Federal prosecutors in North Carolina need to act with a
sense of urgency in reassessing crack sentences.

Those inmates may already have paid their debt to society, and then some.