Pubdate: Fri, 06 Aug 2010 Source: Wall Street Journal (US) Section: Review and Outlook Copyright: 2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Contact: http://www.wsj.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487 RACE AND THE DRUG LAWS Black Lawmakers Hit Crack-Cocaine Offenders With Stiffer Penalties. President Obama signed legislation Tuesday that narrows the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses. Mr. Obama has said that harsher sentences for crack cocaine violations have "disproportionately filled our prisons with young black and Latino drug users." That is true, but the suggestion that this was the intent of subjecting crack offenders to tougher penalties ignores the historical record. Under the old law, enacted during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, a person convicted of selling five grams of crack was subject to the same mandatory minimum five-year sentence as someone selling 500 grams of powder cocaine. The new law reduces that 100-to-1 ratio to about 18-to-1 and eliminates the five-year mandatory minimum for first-time possession of crack. In 2008, blacks constituted 80% of the defendants sentenced under federal crack cocaine laws, and sentences for crack offenses averaged 24 months longer than those for powder cocaine. The political left uses such data to decry these federal sentencing guidelines as racially unjust. But in fact 11 of the 21 black Members of Congress at the time voted for the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which resulted in the 100-to-1 crack-powder differential. It's also worth asking whether proponents of the revised law balanced their concerns about the sentencing disparity among offenders against the benefit to black communities when crack dealers are locked up longer for pushing a drug that has had a devastating impact on black neighborhoods. Government data show that the level of violence linked to crack distribution has stabilized over the past decade, so there was certainly an argument for revisiting these sentencing guidelines. But whether this recent trend can be attributed to fewer new users of the drug or tougher laws against dealing is still a matter of dispute. And if parity in sentencing for crack and powder offenses, which the Administration has pushed for, is the ultimate goal, there's the option of getting tougher on the most egregious and dangerous powder offenders. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D