RACE AND THE DRUG LAWS

Black Lawmakers Hit Crack-Cocaine Offenders With Stiffer Penalties.

President Obama signed legislation Tuesday that narrows the sentencing
disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses. Mr. Obama has
said that harsher sentences for crack cocaine violations have
"disproportionately filled our prisons with young black and Latino
drug users." That is true, but the suggestion that this was the intent
of subjecting crack offenders to tougher penalties ignores the
historical record.

Under the old law, enacted during the crack cocaine epidemic of the
1980s, a person convicted of selling five grams of crack was subject
to the same mandatory minimum five-year sentence as someone selling
500 grams of powder cocaine. The new law reduces that 100-to-1 ratio
to about 18-to-1 and eliminates the five-year mandatory minimum for
first-time possession of crack.

In 2008, blacks constituted 80% of the defendants sentenced under
federal crack cocaine laws, and sentences for crack offenses averaged
24 months longer than those for powder cocaine. The political left
uses such data to decry these federal sentencing guidelines as
racially unjust. But in fact 11 of the 21 black Members of Congress at
the time voted for the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which resulted in
the 100-to-1 crack-powder differential. It's also worth asking whether
proponents of the revised law balanced their concerns about the
sentencing disparity among offenders against the benefit to black
communities when crack dealers are locked up longer for pushing a drug
that has had a devastating impact on black neighborhoods.

Government data show that the level of violence linked to crack
distribution has stabilized over the past decade, so there was
certainly an argument for revisiting these sentencing guidelines. But
whether this recent trend can be attributed to fewer new users of the
drug or tougher laws against dealing is still a matter of dispute. And
if parity in sentencing for crack and powder offenses, which the
Administration has pushed for, is the ultimate goal, there's the
option of getting tougher on the most egregious and dangerous powder
offenders.