COCAINE, CRACK AND QUESTIONS ABOUT FAIRNESS

The Texas Rangers' manager isn't the only big leaguer staring down a
cocaine predicament.

Congress is, too.

The lawmakers' sticky problem is one of far more significance to
America's legal system and the nation's social fabric than Ron
Washington's pathetic woes.

What Congress is angling to do would redefine the criminal justice
playing field as we know it today.

At issue is a growing and long overdue effort by some federal
lawmakers to reduce the wide and unjustifiable disparity in sentences
doled out to those convicted of crack and powder cocaine.

They're getting close.

Last Wednesday, on the same day Sports Illustrated reported that Ron
Washington tested positive for cocaine during the 2009 season, a key
Senate committee was, coincidentally, hammering away at the sentencing
disparity issue.

The work by the Senate Judiciary Committee unfortunately was
overshadowed locally by Washington's personal confession - he said he
used cocaine one time - and nationally by the raging debate over
health care reform.

The committee unanimously approved the aforementioned bill that would
narrow the sentencing gap between federal crack and powder cocaine
offenses.

"If this bill is enacted into law," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told The
Associated Press, "it will immediately ensure that every year,
thousands of people are treated more fairly in our criminal justice
system."

The measure isn't the home run sought by Durbin and other lawmakers
who want to completely equalize the punishment. (The House Judiciary
Committee voted 16-9 last summer to do exactly that.)

But I'd call it a stand-up double. Better still, given that the Senate
bill was a bipartisan compromise that won full committee support, it
suggests that Congress is well on its way to at least reducing the
disparity, perhaps as early as next month.

OK, now let's talk about what the current 100-to-1 sentencing
disparity means: Someone convicted of possessing crack cocaine now
gets the same mandatory jail sentence as someone with 100 times that
amount of powder cocaine. More to the point, it means that someone
possessing as little as 5 grams of crack faces a mandatory five-year
minimum sentence in prison.

That has never made much sense to me.

Don't get me wrong. As someone who has buried three misguided
relatives caught up in the crack epidemic, I certainly understand the
grave concerns that prompted lawmakers to effectively create a dual
punishment scheme: one for powder cocaine, a drug linked to wealthy,
glamorous types, and another for crack, a cheap derivative associated
with poverty and crime.

Crack cocaine rocked many inner cities in the early '80s, ushering in
a new wave of violence on street corners.

"A lot of that turned out to be mythology in hindsight," said Marc
Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington,
D.C.-based nonprofit pushing to eliminate the sentencing disparity
between crack and powder cocaine. "The violence associated with crack
was not associated with the drug itself but with the drug market."

As the crack epidemic took root, turf battles cropped up. "People who
sold [powder] cocaine would stand on these corners, and then these
people with crack came," said Mauer.

But a sharp rise in both violence and drug use led many lawmakers to
believe that crack was inherently more dangerous and insidious than
other drugs. So we ended up with the 100-to-1 sentencing guideline
that not only has filled up prisons but fueled long-held concerns that
our criminal-justice system is racially biased.

Nearly 5,000 people, most of them black men, are locked up in federal
prisons each year for relatively minor drug offenses.

Durbin cited figures showing that blacks made up 30 percent of crack
users but represented more than 80 percent of those convicted of
federal crack charges. Study after study has shown such racial bias.

And yet, we keep lockin' 'em up and throwing away the
key.

Since 1980, the number of drug offenders in federal prison has
mushroomed from under 5,000 to nearly 100,000 last year, or more than
half of all federal inmates.

"This notorious law has led to enormous racial disparity in federal
prison and contributed to a perception of unfairness within
communities of color," said Mauer. "Addressing this misguided policy
is long overdue."

I have no problem at all with our nation's drug sentences being as
tough as they come. But they ought to be fair.