A step toward racial fairness in cocaine penalties

‘Soft on crime!” – how’s that for a re-election slogan?

It took some political courage last week, so close to elections, for the U.S. House of Representatives to relax the federal sentencing laws for crack cocaine. President Obama signed the bill into law Tuesday, fulfilling a campaign promise to cut the racially tainted disparity between penalties for crack and powder cocaine.

The disparity was chiseled into federal law in 1986, when an onslaught of crack-driven street violence persuaded lawmakers that the crack form of cocaine was fundamentally different than powdered “coke.” More addictive, more psychosis-inducing, more dangerous in general.

The scare led Congress to mandate a minimum of five years in prison for possession of five grams of crack. For powder cocaine, it took 500 grams to trigger the mandatory five years.

As a matter of statistics, African Americans tend more toward crack than whites; whites tend more toward coke.

So the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 put more blacks than whites in prison, with longer sentences.

The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group with good numbers, recently found that the average time served by blacks for drug offenses surged by 62 percent between 1994 and 2003, compared to 17 percent for whites. The 100-to-one disparity was part of the reason.

A case might be made for some disparity in the minimums. Crack is more likely to be involved in street-trafficking and gang violence, and it’s more likely to reach youth. Terrifying sentences can be a useful hammer against particularly vicious local drug dealers; police task forces cleaned up Tacoma’s Hilltop with the help of tough federal penalties that put violent career criminals out of business for good.

But there’s no way to justify that 100-to-one ratio. The first priority of federal drug enforcement should be big-time smugglers and kingpins, and they tend to traffic in powder. Federal law has treated the mere possession of crack as a far greater crime than the possession of meth and heroin, which are hardly less dangerous.

The new law reduces the sentencing disparity to 28-to-one, still far too high but a big step in the right direction. Just as important, it scraps any minimum sentence for first-time convictions for mere possession.

Mandatory minimums in general are suspect. They prevent judges from weighing important circumstances – such as criminal history, coercion and overzealous prosecution– that may argue for leniency. When a common addict with a handful of crack can be sent up for five or 10 years, the potential for injustice is just too great.