Pubdate: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 Source: Dallas Morning News (TX) Copyright: 2010 The Dallas Morning News, Inc. Contact: http://www.dallasnews.com/cgi-bin/lettertoed.cgi Website: http://www.dallasnews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117 Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine) GOOD FIX FOR COCAINE SENTENCING DISPARITY House Republicans joined Democrats this week in supporting a dramatic change to federal sentencing guidelines for possession of crack cocaine, a major step toward correcting the lopsided imprisonment of blacks for drug offenses. The new sentencing bill, already approved by the Senate, should help dramatically reduce prison populations and end a disgraceful era of racial injustice in this country. Since 1986, when cocaine trafficking and violence was rampant in many inner-city areas, federal law has imposed a 100-to-1 ratio in the sentencing emphasis placed on crack possession compared with powder cocaine. That means a person need only possess 5 grams of crack to trigger a mandatory five-year federal prison sentence, whereas it would take 500 grams of powder cocaine to merit the same sentence. Wednesday's passage of the Fair Sentencing Act reduces this disparity to a still-high 18-to-1 ratio. But President Barack Obama is almost certain to sign the bill, having argued during the 2008 campaign that the current disparity "disproportionately filled our prisons with young black and Latino drug users." Still, this newspaper believes Congress should aim at 1-to-1 parity between the two forms of cocaine, which Texas law already does. The original sentencing disparity was based on statistically unfounded assumptions about crack trafficking, such as the belief that crack is significantly more addictive and that crack users and dealers are more prone to violence. The United States Sentencing Commission, an independent agency of the federal judiciary, argued throughout the past decade that the guidelines needed changing. In March 2008, the commission approved a retroactive guideline to reduce sentences for crack convicts, which allowed 12,000 people to receive reductions averaging two years. Roughly 80 percent of those imprisoned for crack possession have been black - and an overwhelming number male - despite the fact that the majority of cocaine users are not African-American, according to Sentencing Commission statistics. And, according to surveys compiled over several years, crack ranks a distant last place behind marijuana, methamphetamine and powder cocaine among drug use by 18- to 25-year-olds. So why do black male crack convicts so heavily dominate the nation's prison population? Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., says the high mandatory sentences for crack pushed the number of drug offenders in federal prisons from 5,000 in 1980 to nearly 100,000 in 2009. Had federal statistics shown a sizeable increase in the number of high-level cocaine importers and traffickers among those imprisoned, the argument might have been stronger for harsher sentencing guidelines. But it's obvious that law enforcers went for the easiest arrests and did so in racially skewed ways. The Fair Sentencing Act will help fix that imbalance. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake