CRACK VS. POWDER

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.