Congress steps toward fairer drug sentencing
Chicago
Sun-Times
July 30, 2010
In
a rare show of bipartisanship, the U.S. House of Representatives
Wednesday voted to reduce the disparities between mandatory federal
sentences for possession of crack and powder cocaine.
The bill represents a significant step toward greater fairness, even sanity, in our nation's drug laws, but we wish it had gone further.
We would have preferred a law that eliminates sentencing disparities completely. And simple fairness demands that the change apply retroactively to low-level crack cocaine offenders already serving unfairly long prison sentences.
Under the current law, adopted in 1986 in reaction to an inner-city surge in crack-related violent crimes, a person convicted of possessing a small amount of crack cocaine is punished with the same prison sentence as someone who possessed 100 times the same amount of powder cocaine.
Crack cocaine offenders are usually black, while powder cocaine offenders are more often white.
Under the bill passed Wednesday, that disparity would be reduced from 100 to 1 to just 18 to 1. The Senate approved the bill in March.
The current penalties for crack cocaine -- including a mandatory five-year sentence for possession of as little as 5 grams -- were created at a time when crack was a relatively new and fast-spreading drug and, compared to powder cocaine, thought to be especially dangerous. Americans feared a crack epidemic was sweeping the nation, beginning in our inner cities and creating untold numbers of broken inner-city addicts and "crack babies."
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who voted for the 1986 law, said it's obvious now, looking back, that the harsher penalties were a drastic "overreaction" to the crack scare.
Crack use in the inner city eventually declined, though it continues to be a serious problem, and the feared national epidemic failed to materialize. Studies conducted since 1986, as summed up by the United States Sentencing Commission, throw cold water on claims that crack cocaine makes people more violent than powder cocaine does, or that it is physically more dangerous, even to a fetus.
Less clear is whether crack is more addictive. Because it delivers a shorter and more intense high, some researchers say, it may lead users to seek it out more frequently.
Durbin, who co-sponsored the Senate version of the bill, says he wanted to eliminate the sentencing disparities entirely. But this was the best that he and his co-sponsor, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), could do and get the votes.
In rabidly partisan Washington, we'd call that quite an achievement -- and a victory for fairness.
The bill represents a significant step toward greater fairness, even sanity, in our nation's drug laws, but we wish it had gone further.
We would have preferred a law that eliminates sentencing disparities completely. And simple fairness demands that the change apply retroactively to low-level crack cocaine offenders already serving unfairly long prison sentences.
Under the current law, adopted in 1986 in reaction to an inner-city surge in crack-related violent crimes, a person convicted of possessing a small amount of crack cocaine is punished with the same prison sentence as someone who possessed 100 times the same amount of powder cocaine.
Crack cocaine offenders are usually black, while powder cocaine offenders are more often white.
Under the bill passed Wednesday, that disparity would be reduced from 100 to 1 to just 18 to 1. The Senate approved the bill in March.
The current penalties for crack cocaine -- including a mandatory five-year sentence for possession of as little as 5 grams -- were created at a time when crack was a relatively new and fast-spreading drug and, compared to powder cocaine, thought to be especially dangerous. Americans feared a crack epidemic was sweeping the nation, beginning in our inner cities and creating untold numbers of broken inner-city addicts and "crack babies."
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who voted for the 1986 law, said it's obvious now, looking back, that the harsher penalties were a drastic "overreaction" to the crack scare.
Crack use in the inner city eventually declined, though it continues to be a serious problem, and the feared national epidemic failed to materialize. Studies conducted since 1986, as summed up by the United States Sentencing Commission, throw cold water on claims that crack cocaine makes people more violent than powder cocaine does, or that it is physically more dangerous, even to a fetus.
Less clear is whether crack is more addictive. Because it delivers a shorter and more intense high, some researchers say, it may lead users to seek it out more frequently.
Durbin, who co-sponsored the Senate version of the bill, says he wanted to eliminate the sentencing disparities entirely. But this was the best that he and his co-sponsor, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), could do and get the votes.
In rabidly partisan Washington, we'd call that quite an achievement -- and a victory for fairness.