For over 25 years, many politicians, including the late Senator Ted Kennedy, fought to redress the imbalance between federally mandated sentences for possession of crack cocaine and the powder form of the drug. Therefore, it is ironic that no one became more identified with this fight than rap mogul Russell Simmons.
[I]t is Simmons who has led opposition to draconian Rockefeller drug law that has had such a disparate impact on poor blacks. For the application of this law invariably results in longer sentences for the small amount of crack cocaine that blacks usually possess than for a much larger amount of powder cocaine that whites usually possess…
(Black political leadership is dead…, The iPINIONS Journal, April 26, 2005)
For example, a person convicted of possessing five grams of crack cocaine got the same mandatory sentence as one convicted of possessing 500 grams of powder cocaine.
Of course, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that the prevailing view in 1986, when this law was enacted, was that, because it was so cheap, the use of crack cocaine was becoming epidemic. Not to mention the association that was established between crack and inner city violence. Still, it did not take long to realize that populating federal prisons with people convicted for possessing small amounts of crack cocaine was demonstrably unfair.
Human Rights Watch’s analysis of prison admission data for 2003 revealed that relative to population, blacks are 10.1 times more likely than whites to be sent to prison for drug offenses.
(Fellner, Jamie, “Decades of Disparity: Drug Arrests and Race in the United States,” Human Rights Watch (New York, NY: March 2009), p. 16)
Then there’s this:
Blacks comprise 62.7 percent and whites 36.7 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prison, even though federal surveys and other data detailed in this report show clearly that this racial disparity bears scant relation to racial differences in drug offending. There are, for example, five times more white drug users than black. Relative to population, black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men. In large part because of the extraordinary racial disparities in incarceration for drug offenses, blacks are incarcerated for all offenses at 8.2 times the rate of whites. One in every 20 black men over the age of 18 in the United States is in state or federal prison, compared to one in 180 white men.
(Human Rights Watch, “Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs” (Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch, 2000)
Not to mention the long-term social and economic impact disparate sentences for drug offenses have had not just on black families but life in the inner cities of America.
This is why it is so important that Obama has now followed through on his transformative promise to bridge the gap in sentencing for drug offenses, which he said during his presidential campaign was a gap that “cannot be justified and should be eliminated.”
Most importantly, the bill he signed on Tuesday will eliminate the five-year mandatory minimum for first-time possession of crack that compelled judges to send so many blacks to prison. But it’s not a perfect resolution because it only reduces the current disparity in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine from 100:1 to 18:1.
This day was long in coming. [This bill will] go a long way toward ensuring that our sentencing laws are tough, consistent, and fair.
(Attorney General Eric Holder, CNN, August 3, 2010)
It’s just too bad that, in order to get Republican votes, the Democrats – who control both houses of Congress – agreed not to make this new law retroactive. After all, if the law was so inherently unjust, those unjustly affected by it should have benefited by its repeal, no?
Besides, I can think of no better way to deal with prison overcrowding in this country than by freeing blacks who have already served years for possessing crack under the old federal sentencing guidelines. Especially since then there would be no excuse for prison authorities to grant early release to celebrity convicts like Lindsay Lohan – who served only 13 of 90 days – because of overcrowding.
Finally, the reason I titled this commentary the real drug war is that America’s declared war on drugs has always been a misguided farce. Not least because targeting drugs coming into the country is rather like bailing out a sinking ship with a spoon. Instead, lobbying to decriminalize the use of all drugs is the only war that was ever worth fighting. In the meantime, though, eliminating the gross disparity in sentencing for drug offenses is certainly a battle worth fighting.
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Black political leadership is dead
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