|
|
|
"Cracked" Sentencing System for Cocaine Needs to be Fixed |
Laws passed hastily in response to news headlines seldom turn out to be good for the public. The law of unintended consequences applies as certainly to legislation as it does to life in general. Yet, legislators are loath to reverse what they did in haste, even when there is overwhelming evidence that the law is both harmful and ineffective.
Such is the case with the current 100 to 1 disparity in penalties for crack cocaine and powder cocaine. When college basketball great Len Bias dropped dead, overdosed from snorting cocaine, crack was suspected. Soon news shows trumpeted stories about “instant addiction” and crack babies overwhelming our inner cities. Congress jumped in quickly and passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which established mandatory harsh sentences for small quantities of crack – one hundred times smaller than the amounts of powder cocaine that triggered the same sentence. There was no science underlying the 100 to 1 sentence disparity, but crack seemed so much worse that the penalties ought to be much tougher.
To put this in perspective, a powder cocaine dealer who sells 5000 grams, which would fill a briefcase, earns a mandatory ten year sentence. Yet, someone selling crack cocaine would get that same decade-long sentence for selling only 50 grams, about the size of a candy bar. Now, this disparity might be justified if crack were much more addictive or potent. But science tells us it isn’t more addictive or potent.
It is not the form that the cocaine comes in, but the way that it is administered that makes it relatively more potent. Smoked in the form of crack, cocaine gives a faster, shorter high. Snorted in the nose, powder cocaine gives a slower, longer high. But the poison is the same whether it is in powder or crack form. Yet, federal law treats crack as 100 times worse! That is simply unjust.
Eric E. Sterling, who helped write the drastic sentencing law in 1986, but now realizes how wrong those policies were, has dedicated his life to correcting the unjust sentence lengths as head of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation http://www.cjpf.org/.
Sterling notes, "When you look at this 50-gram candy bar, it is not the quantity that deserves a kingpin sentence of 10 years" or more. Sterling thinks the trigger for a mandatory minimum should be higher, perhaps 50 kilograms. "That gets us into the level where the Justice Department is going to focus on big dealers," he said.
Yet, the federal government is not putting its resources on the kingpins. Only 7 percent of federal cocaine cases are directed at high level traffickers, while one-third of their cocaine cases involve an average of 52 grams – again, the weight of a candy bar.
When the sentences are computed on these actual cases, street level crack dealers are actually punished 300 times more severely than high level cocaine powder traffickers on a punishment-per-gram basis.
A second justification for the sentence disparity is the “crack baby” epidemic. But that turns out to also be media hype. There truly is a problem of children exposed to cocaine, both powder and crack, while in their mothers’ wombs but crack is no more harmful than powder. As the U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in 2002, "The negative effects of prenatal crack cocaine are identical to the negative effects of prenatal powder cocaine exposure and are significantly less severe than previously believed. (They) are similar to those associated with prenatal tobacco exposure and less severe than the negative effects of prenatal alcohol exposure."
There is one effect of crack cocaine that has devastated whole sections of our cities – the disproportionate imprisonment of black men. Because crack is a form of cocaine sold in small quantities for little money, users buy it many times a day requiring flagrant, open and violent markets which are easy targets to raid. These open-air markets are often located in poor neighborhoods and employ young African-Americans. While, two-thirds of the nation’s crack users are white and Hispanic, the sellers are usually black. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported that “The overwhelming majority of offenders subject to the heightened crack cocaine penalties are black, about 85 percent in 2000.”
The American Civil Liberties Union issued a report last year that found "African Americans now serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense at 58.7 months as whites do for a violent offense at 61.7 months."
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders has written, “It is a sorry day for any country when putting small-time offenders away for years -- while violent drug kingpins go free -- is considered tough on crime. If that's tough, it's stupid tough.”
Fortunately, there is a strong bi-partisan movement to correct this inequity in cocaine sentences. While liberal stalwarts like Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) have sought to end this injustice for years, they have been joined by conservative Republicans Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and others who take the moral stand rather than “looking tough” by passing ineffective and harmful laws without evidence to back up the penalties, they will insist that our sentencing laws be carefully tailored to fit the harm done by the crime. They are profiles in courage. I will keep you informed as the efforts to reform the crack/powder disparity move through Congress.
In His service,
Pat Nolan
President, Justice Fellowship
Resources
The American Civil Liberties Union – “Cracks in the System”
Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986
Congress Is Expected to Revisit Sentencing Laws
Cracks in the System: Twenty Years of the Unjust Federal Crack Cocaine Law
Criminal Justice Policy Foundation
Debra Saunders, Columnist
Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM)
Justice Fellowship Resource Page on Mandatory Minimums
Previous Justice eReport “Mandatory Minimums: Unjust and Unbiblical”
The Right Has a Jailhouse Conversion
U.S. Sentencing Commission Report to Congress on Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy |
|
