CHANGE IN SENTENCING IS A STEP IN RIGHT DIRECTION

What do you call the idea of turning nearly 20,000 drug criminals
loose from prison two years or more before they've served their full
sentences? A good start. The U.S. Sentencing Commission recently
lowered its sentencing guidelines for offenses involving crack cocaine
to bring them in line with the sentences involving powder cocaine.
Simple possession of just 5 grams of crack - less than two of those
little sugar packs on restaurant tables - has carried a five-year
mandatory sentence. You had to get caught with 500 grams of powder to
hit the five-year mandatory.

Now the commission is apparently on the verge of making the adjustment
retroactive.

The commission in the past also tweaked LSD, OxyContin and other drug
sentences when faddish politics had thrown them out of whack. Judges
and civil rights organizations have long protested the disparity in
crack and powder sentences and guidelines, and the Criminal Law
Committee of the U.S. Judicial Conference has supported applying the
changes to current crack prisoners.

There is no moral basis for levying draconian sentences on one group
while levying lesser, more proportionate sentences on another for the
same crimes. The grossly skewed sentences are the product of hysteria
about crack in the 1980s that demagogic politics enthusiastically
riled up and then serviced with grandstanding crackdowns, as clamoring
pols outbid one another in the severity of the prison sentences they
were promoting. The consequences have been especially devastating in
the black community, with ill effects that have rippled through the
whole society. Scores of thousands of men, mainly, have been
unnecessarily burdened with prison records that have made them
near-hopeless prospects for employment or marriage. Cheaper than
powder cocaine, crack became the drug of the poor, with the result
that some 81 percent of crack prisoners are African-American -
although two-thirds of users are white and Hispanic. And blacks serve
an average 57 months for drug offenses, nearly equal the average 61
months whites serve for violent crimes.

Making crack and powder sentencing congruent is a step years overdue,
but welcome as the step is, it is only a small one toward a broadly
sensible and effective engagement with the drug challenge.

The futility of essentially just criminalizing the issue ought to be
apparent to everyone by now.