GOOD FIX FOR COCAINE SENTENCING DISPARITY

House Republicans joined Democrats this week in supporting a dramatic
change to federal sentencing guidelines for possession of crack
cocaine, a major step toward correcting the lopsided imprisonment of
blacks for drug offenses. The new sentencing bill, already approved by
the Senate, should help dramatically reduce prison populations and end
a disgraceful era of racial injustice in this country.

Since 1986, when cocaine trafficking and violence was rampant in many
inner-city areas, federal law has imposed a 100-to-1 ratio in the
sentencing emphasis placed on crack possession compared with powder
cocaine. That means a person need only possess 5 grams of crack to
trigger a mandatory five-year federal prison sentence, whereas it
would take 500 grams of powder cocaine to merit the same sentence.

Wednesday's passage of the Fair Sentencing Act reduces this disparity
to a still-high 18-to-1 ratio. But President Barack Obama is almost
certain to sign the bill, having argued during the 2008 campaign that
the current disparity "disproportionately filled our prisons with
young black and Latino drug users."

Still, this newspaper believes Congress should aim at 1-to-1 parity
between the two forms of cocaine, which Texas law already does. The
original sentencing disparity was based on statistically unfounded
assumptions about crack trafficking, such as the belief that crack is
significantly more addictive and that crack users and dealers are more
prone to violence.

The United States Sentencing Commission, an independent agency of the
federal judiciary, argued throughout the past decade that the
guidelines needed changing. In March 2008, the commission approved a
retroactive guideline to reduce sentences for crack convicts, which
allowed 12,000 people to receive reductions averaging two years.

Roughly 80 percent of those imprisoned for crack possession have been
black - and an overwhelming number male - despite the fact that the
majority of cocaine users are not African-American, according to
Sentencing Commission statistics. And, according to surveys compiled
over several years, crack ranks a distant last place behind marijuana,
methamphetamine and powder cocaine among drug use by 18- to
25-year-olds.

So why do black male crack convicts so heavily dominate the nation's
prison population? Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., says the high mandatory
sentences for crack pushed the number of drug offenders in federal
prisons from 5,000 in 1980 to nearly 100,000 in 2009.

Had federal statistics shown a sizeable increase in the number of
high-level cocaine importers and traffickers among those imprisoned,
the argument might have been stronger for harsher sentencing
guidelines. But it's obvious that law enforcers went for the easiest
arrests and did so in racially skewed ways. The Fair Sentencing Act
will help fix that imbalance.