Finally, finally, finally the Feds have made a truly sane choice when it comes to the crack/powder sentencing controversy. After voting earlier to repair the disparity between the mandatory minimums handed out for crack cocaine and those handed out for powder, on Tuesday, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to let that change be retroactive. This means that approximately 19,500 federal prison inmates, close to 90 percent of them black, will be able to ask for a reduction in their crack cocaine sentences.
Prior to this pair of remarkably level-headed decisions, if you attempted to sell five grams of crack cocaine—even if you were a first time offender—you’d get at least a five-year trip to the slammer. But it’d take getting caught with a hundred grams of powder to get you the same sentence—in other words a 100 to 1 difference..
Alarmists and naysayers—including Attorney General Michael Mukasey speaking for the Bush administration—have been shrieking for months that thousands of dangerous felons will be let loose to roam the streets and terrorize the citizenry if the sentencing commission had the guts to make this move. As you’ll remember, Hillary Clinton was dead set against retroactivity. Rudy Giuliani has been nattering endlessly about how such a decision might bring down the empire.
They are all of them full of…sh-h-h… sugar. This AP story neatly explains the truth of the matter:
Most of those eligible could receive no more than a two-year cut in their prison terms, but roughly 3,800 inmates could be released from prison within a year after the March 3 effective date of Tuesday’s decision. Federal judges will have the final say whether to reduce sentences.
The commissioners said the delay until March would give judges and prison officials time to deal with public safety and other issues.
The horror.
It should be noted that the sentencing structures still aren’t even-steven.. Even after the changes, crack convictions will result in sentences that are two to five times as long as those for powder. But at least it ain’t 100 to one.
To better understand the total lunacy of the old sentencing structure, it helps to look at the physical difference between crack and powder.
As you probably know (or can logically deduce) crack cocaine is made from powder cocaine. (DUH!) This is done by taking powder cocaine and dissolving it in a solution of baking soda and water. The solution is boiled down over a low flame and a solid substance separates from the boiling mixture and sorta floats to the top, the excess soda dropping to the bottom of the pan. The top floating stuff is crack. (See handy photo above.) One fishes it out and allows it to dry on, say, paper towels. Once dry, it may be cut into “rocks,” each typically weighing from one-tenth to one-half of a gram.
Now here’s the important part: One gram of pure powder cocaine converts to 0.89 grams of crack. Put another way, the DEA estimates that crack rocks are between 75% and 90% pure cocaine.
So why did it make sense for the sentencing disparity between crack and powder to be 100 to one? It didn’t.
When Congress passed the whacked out-sentencing guidelines into law in the 1980s, the conventional wisdom was that crack was a lot more addictive than blow. Yet, although it’s much faster acting—since you smoke it rather than snort it—scientific evidence and analysis by the U.S. Sentencing Commission has shown that the rest of the conventional wisdom on the subject is not supported by….you know…facts.
So, despite the pressure to do otherwise, the commission members were clear about what they needed to do, as noted in this nicely written piece in the LA Times.
Members of the commission said the move was an important first step to correct what they said was a major injustice that Congress had failed to address.
“Our country has moved in the wrong direction with regard to the so-called war on drugs,” Ruben Castillo, a federal judge in Chicago and a vice chairman of the commission, said before the vote Tuesday. “We need to refocus this war.”
Michael Horowitz, a former Justice Department official and another member of the commission, said: “This is not a get-out-of-jail-free card by any means, but a fairness issue.”
Fairness and sanity. How very refreshing!
Better late than never I guess. But watch the “Law n’ Order” types on the GOP Presidential trail go ballistic.
I always cringe when I read the words “war on drugsâ€Â. The United States strategy of using law enforcement as a prime deterrent to fighting drugs has been a woeful failure. The majority of people in jail, are in jail for drug related offenses.
U.S. drug users help fund
1) Powerful drug cartels in Mexico which have corrupted every level of their government.
2) Terrorists and criminals in Afghanistan which we spend billions fighting.
3) Columbian drug cartels and guerilla armies.
4) U.S. street gangs which buy weapons and kill for control of drug territory.
5) And way too many other problems to list here……
I remember when George Bush launched a salvo at former Mexico President Vicente Fox, asking Fox to do more to stop the drug cartels in Mexico. Fox responded by telling Bush “Tell your people to quit using so many drugs†(yea brother).
We need to launch a huge drug education campaign in our country. This just might be cheaper then the billions we have spent on drug enforcement. We need to educate kids at a very early age, what world-wide problems their drug use help create. How many college students are occasional drug users and don’t ever consider the ramifications of their drug use? Maybe certain drugs such as marijuana should be legalized. And of course free drug rehabilitation for all.
For decades I have heard law enforcement brag about a “big drug bust†and how it will affect the drug market. I seriously doubt any crack head, has ever stopped using crack because of a big drug bust. How much of our tax dollars have been spent or wasted on law enforcement, courts, judges, jails and etc with NO real results? Time to try a new approach, the current one is not working.
Oh, I didn’t know that 90% of those who would benefit are black when I supported this action. Why didn’t someone tell me, as that’s what you want to believe is my position?