WILLIAM RASPBERRY: SENTENCING DISPARITIES

Clinton Was All Talk But No Action On This Issue

Black Americans have been screaming about the disparate sentences for
crack and powder cocaine for a decade - ever since it became clear
that the main effect of the 1988 drug-control legislation was a
wildly disproportionate incarceration rate for black drug offenders.

Six days before he left office, Bill Clinton came riding to the
rescue. Well, maybe not to the rescue, but he did recommend that the
next sheriff give serious thought to forming a posse to do something
about the problem.

The recommendation came in a Jan. 14 op-ed piece the lame-duck
president wrote for the New York Times. He spoke with considerable
passion about his desire that America move toward racial fairness and
reconciliation.

Then, he said, "We also should re-examine our federal sentencing
policies, particularly mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent
offenders. We should immediately reduce the disparity between crack
and powder-cocaine sentences."

Maybe it slipped his mind during his eight-year presidency that
coincided almost exactly with the incarceration explosion.

Yes, explosion. According to a new report from the Justice Policy
Institute, more inmates were added to prison and jail populations
under Mr. Clinton than under any other president in American history.
In federal prisons alone, more inmates were added on Mr. Clinton's
watch than under George Bush and Ronald Reagan combined.

"President Clinton stole the show from the tough-on-crime
Republicans," the institute's president, Vincent Schiraldi, said in
releasing the report, "Too Little, Too Late: President Clinton's
Prison Legacy."

"President Clinton was right to call for criminal justice reform; he
was wrong to do so little about it while he was in office," Mr.
Schiraldi said.

As it happens, he had a chance at least to engage the crack/powder
fight as early as his first term in office. In 1994, he signed a bill
setting up a commission designed to develop and oversee sentencing
guidelines. In 1995, the commission recommended equalizing the amount
of cocaine, whether in powder or crack form, that would trigger the
mandatory sentences that have been a major contributor to the
incarceration explosion.

Such recommendations, says the Justice Policy Institute's Jason
Ziedenberg, usually win "virtually automatic acceptance." But this
time, Congress rejected the recommendation, and Mr. Clinton in effect
signed the rejection into law.

In other words, he passed up a chance to do what his recent New York
Times piece so glibly recommends - reducing the high-sounding words
of that column to a largely empty gesture.

I am reminded of the big deal he made of putting the District of
Columbia's whiny new license plate - "Taxation Without
Representation" - on the presidential limousine in ostensible support
for expanding the feeble franchise of district residents.

But the license-plate change - made just a couple of days before
Christmas - was about the sum of his official effort in that regard.
George W. Bush, in one of his first decisions as Mr. Clinton's
successor, had the plates removed.

Interestingly, the Justice Policy Institute now is looking to Mr.
Bush as the best hope for sentencing reform. The new report notes
that Mr. Bush has expressed an interest in "making sure the
powder-cocaine and crack-cocaine penalties are the same" and in
diverting nonviolent offenders from prison into treatment. A
Bush-Cheney campaign white paper called for providing an additional
$1 billion for states to expand local drug treatment programs.

"As the governor with the nation's largest prison population and the
most executions, President Bush has no need to prove his conservative
mettle," said Lisa Feldman, who co-authored the institute's report.
"He has shown he can be tough on crime. Now, he has the opportunity
to prove he can be smart on crime as well."

Smart-aleck question: Who would get more credit among black voters -
Mr. Bush, for reforming the sentencing disparities we have been
complaining about for so long? Or Mr. Clinton, for locating his
office in Harlem?

William Raspberry writes for the Washington Post. His e-mail address
is willrasp@washpost.com.