Pubdate: Sat, 29 Jul 2006 Source: Montgomery Advertiser (AL) Copyright: 2006 The Advertiser Co. Contact: http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/customerservice/letter.htm Website: http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1088 Note: Letters from the newspaper's circulation area receive publishing priority Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine) COCAINE SENTENCING REFORM JUSTIFIED No one can plausibly label Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions a bleeding-heart, soft-on-crime politician. The conservative Republican previously served as attorney general of Alabama and as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of the state. Given that, Sessions has ample law-and-order credentials and plenty of credibility when proposing reforms in the glaringly unbalanced sentencing for cocaine offenses. This is not a question of coddling criminals, but rather a move toward a more equitable sentencing structure for offenses involving the different forms of the drug. Under the current federal sentencing structure, offenses involving crack cocaine are punished significantly more harshly than offenses involving powder cocaine. The disparity is huge. Five grams of crack cocaine means five years in prison, but it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to draw the same sentence. Fifty grams of crack cocaine brings a 10-year sentence, but an offender has to have 5,000 grams of powder cocaine to get the same sentence. A 100:1 disparity is hard to defend under any circumstances and has drawn particular criticism because of the much higher incidence of crack cocaine use among minorities, particularly African-Americans. There is a strong case to be made for stiffer penalties for crack cocaine offenses. Crack cocaine, cheaper and more addictive than powder cocaine, tends to produce violent behavior and other criminal activity related to obtaining the drug. Even so, the 100:1 disparity in the amounts leading to sentencing is excessive. "We've had a lot of concerns and complaints about that, and I think they're legitimate," Sessions said in an interview with the Birmingham News. Sessions proposes dropping the disparity to 20:1 by reducing the amount of powder cocaine in the sentencing equation and increasing the amount of crack cocaine. For a 10-year sentence, for example, that would mean 200 grams of crack cocaine and 4,000 grams of powder cocaine. "I think it's the right balance," Sessions told the News. "I believe it would improve the sentencing guidelines, create more integrity in the system and create more public confidence in the system." It's clearly a fairer approach. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman