GET OUT OF JAIL EARLY

Crack Dealers Catch A Break From Team Obama.

Poor neighborhoods in America's inner cities already endure an excess
of drug-related crime and violence. The Obama Administration's push to
retroactively apply a new law that reduces sentences for crack cocaine
convictions is unlikely to help.

Last August, President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which
narrows the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine
offenses. Under the old law, a person convicted of selling five grams
of crack received the same mandatory minimum five-year sentences as
someone selling 500 grams of powder cocaine. The new law reduces that
100-to-1 disparity to about 18-to-1, and last week the Administration
called for the new sentencing rules to be implemented
retroactively.

If that happens, more than 12,000 convicts could have their sentences
reduced by an average of three years, and more than 4,000 prisoners
could be out by the end of next year. Upon release these former
inmates are not headed for Santa Monica and Scarsdale. More likely,
they will return home to places like Compton and the South Bronx to
again terrorize the law-abiding.

Attorney General Eric Holder justified the decision in the name of
"ensuring a fair and effective criminal justice system." He added that
the Administration wants early release to be applied only to prisoners
who lack long criminal histories and whose crimes didn't involve weapons.

The previous sentencing guidelines were enacted during the crack
epidemic of the 1980s, and it's worth recalling that they were
supported by 11 of the 21 black Members of Congress at the time.
President Obama has said that harsher sentences for crack cocaine
offenses have "disproportionately filled our prisons with young black
and Latino drug users," which is true. But the more relevant concern
is whether the black underclass is better off when dealers do more
time for pushing a drug that has devastated poor black
communities.

The Administration's proposal comes on the heels of last month's
Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata, which upheld the release of
as many as 46,000 convicted criminals to relieve overcrowding in
California's prison system. In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito
described the result in Pennsylvania in the 1990s after thousands of
inmates in Philadelphia were freed due to overcrowding.

"Although efforts were made to release only those prisoners who were
least likely to commit violent crimes, that attempt was spectacularly
unsuccessful," wrote Justice Alito. "During an 18 month period, the
Philadelphia police rearrested thousands of these prisoners for
committing 9,732 new crimes. Those defendants were charged with 79
murders, 90 rapes, 1,113 assaults, 959 robberies, 701 burglaries, and
2,748 thefts, not to mention thousands of drug offenses."

The government recently announced that violent crime in the U.S.
reached a 40-year low in 2010. The inner-city black crime rate has
also fallen. Between 1980 and 2005, arrests of blacks for violent
crimes fell by half. Keeping criminals locked up for longer periods of
time doesn't entirely explain the phenomenon-more effective policing
also gets credit-but it has certainly helped. We hope the
Administration's actions don't reverse this welcome trend.