BUSH POSITION CRACKS

Shortly after his election, President Bush offered hope that the
gross and, in their impact, racially discriminatory differences
between mandatory sentences for crimes involving powder and crack
cocaine might be narrowed. Now senior Justice Department officials
are trying to minimize the gap's significance.

Unfortunately their conclusions show more confidence than evidence.
In recent testimony before the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Deputy
Atty. Gen. Larry Thompson turned the usual arguments on their head.
He agreed that harsher penalties for crack dealt a more severe
punishment to the poor blacks and Latinos who disproportionately sell
and use crack.

But he offered that the difference benefits other, law-abiding blacks
and Latinos by providing a greater deterrent to a scourge that has
ravaged their communities.

If anything, said Thompson, who is black, the sentences for powder
cocaine should be raised instead of lowering the penalties for crack,
as some reformers suggest.

It is unarguable that sentencing guidelines look with greater
harshness on possession of crack, a processed form of cocaine. Not
that there may not be differences between the two which may make
crack a somewhat more serious threat to users. Some researchers think
that, because it is typically smoked rather than snorted, crack's
chemical components may be ingested more efficiently, which may make
crack the more addictive substance.

But the differences in the two forms of cocaine don't appear to be as
dramatic as the guidelines would suggest. Example: If you're arrested
with five grams of powder cocaine, you may well get probation. Five
grams of crack typically brings a five-year prison sentence. As for
raising penalties for powder cocaine, even Thompson conceded there is
"no evidence that existing powder penalties are too low."

Instead, there is evidence that crack has become a less provocative
problem than it was in the fiercely violent years that followed its
appearance on U.S. streets in the 1980s. Harsher crack penalties were
created in response to outbreaks of open warfare between rival street
gangs over crack markets in the late 1980s. When drug traffic
stabilized by the early 1990s, its associated violence dropped off,
contributing to an overall drop in violent crime by the mid-1990s,
and now to its lowest levels since the 1960s.

Nevertheless, prisons continued to fill with crack offenders, many of
whom had no record of more serious crimes. To be fair, there is a
chicken-and-egg argument to be had here; some crime researchers
believe the crack-driven epidemic of violence subsided in part
because so many sellers and users were hauled off to jail.

But it has become increasingly apparent that harsher crack sentences
resulted, with the best of intentions, not so much from the possible
differences in the potency or addictiveness of crack versus powder,
but primarily because of the sale of crack in poor neighborhoods
where crime was more prevalent.

In January, 2001, Bush suggested the crack and powder cocaine
penalties should be the same. He also said, "I think a lot of people
are coming to the realization that maybe long minimum sentences for
first-time users may not be the best way to occupy jail space and or
heal people for their disease. And I'm willing to look at that."

Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Jeff Sessions of Alabama
have proposed reducing the disparity by raising the amount of
crack--and reducing the amount of powder cocaine--that would mandate
a five-year sentence.

The Bush administration should huddle with lawmakers to re-examine
the cocaine sentencing gap and, one way or another, reduce it. New
drug policies need to be based on more than the heated emotions of a
dreary and violent past. Above all, the principle of equality under
the law must be pursued and preserved.