Congress Passes Historic Legislation to Reduce Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity
Today, the House passed legislation reducing the two-decades-old sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses. The Senate passed an identical bill in March and the legislation is now heading to President Obama, who supports the reform effort.
This is a historic day, with House Republicans and Democrats in agreement that U.S. drug laws are too harsh and must be reformed. The tide is clearly turning against the failed war on drugs.
Before the changes, a person with just five grams of crack received a mandatory sentence of five years in prison. That same person would have to possess 500 grams of powder cocaine to earn the same punishment. This discrepancy, known as the 100-to-1 ratio, was enacted in the late 1980s and was based on myths about crack cocaine being more dangerous than powder. Scientific evidence, including a major study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, has proven that crack and powder cocaine have identical physiological and psychoactive effects on the human body.
The 100-1 ratio has caused myriad problems, including perpetuating racial disparities, wasting taxpayer money, and targeting low-level offenders instead of dangerous criminals. African Americans comprise 82 percent of those convicted for federal crack cocaine offenses but only 30 percent of crack users, and 62 percent of people convicted for crack offenses were low-level sellers or lookouts.
Advocates pushed to totally eliminate the disparity but ultimately a compromise was struck between Democrats and Republicans to reduce the 100-to-1 disparity to 18-to-1. The compromise also eliminated the five year mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of five grams of cocaine (about two sugar packets worth). The repeal of that mandatory minimum is the first repeal of a mandatory minimum drug sentence since the 1970s. Overall, the compromise bill is expected to reduce the federal prison population by thousands of offenders and save an estimated $42 million in criminal justice spending over the first five years.
I'm overjoyed that thousands of people, mostly African American, will no longer be unjustly subjected to the harsh sentencing laws enacted in the 1980s. The compromise is not perfect and more needs to be done, but this is a huge step forward in reforming our country's overly harsh and wasteful drug laws.
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Well, halla-frakkin-lujah! It's about time!
ETA: Another piece here on how it all came together over last weekend:
Congress addressed a historic wrong on Wednesday afternoon, replacing it instead with a slightly lesser wrong, when the House voted to reduce the disparity in the sentencing of people caught with crack cocaine versus powder cocaine.
To be charged with a felony, crack users needed to possess only 5 grams of the drug. To be hit with the same charge, powder cocaine users needed to be caught with 500 grams. That 100-to-1 disparity has frequently been cited by drug war opponents as exhibit A to buttress their claim that drug laws are racist.
The moment on the House floor came and went fairly quickly, but the ease with which the bill passed belied a lot of behind-the-scenes activity.
As of Friday, the bill was not on the calendar to be considered this week. But on Saturday at the Netroots Nation conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was asked about the disparity and said that she expected the bill to come up the next week. It was placed on the calendar on Tuesday.
Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) controls the floor schedule and has been pushing on the issue for several weeks, working "hand in glove," according to one Senate aide, with Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who sponsored the upper chamber's version of the disparity fix. The Senate aide said that Hoyer was late to a bicameral leadership meeting Tuesday night because he was still making calls to nail down support for the legislation.
A key question was whether Republicans would demand a roll call or allow it to pass by a voice vote. Few vulnerable politicians, in an election year, want to vote on anything that could be cast as being soft on crack cocaine. Hoyer worked directly with House Republicans to assuage some of their concerns in an effort to ward off a demand for a recorded vote, which could jeopardize the legislation.
A House Republican aide confirmed that Hoyer approached Republicans before the vote but said that the GOP's decision not to demand a roll call had more to do with the bill having the support of conservative stalwarts such as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the Prison Fellowship Ministries and activist Grover Norquist. With a left-right coalition intact, the bill sailed through.
In March, the Senate approved the legislation to reduce the disparity to 18 to one, also on a voice vote. The threshold for crack cocaine in the new law will be 28 grams; the powder level remains the same.
President Obama is expected to sign the legislation, having expressed opposition to disparity in the past.
Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) hailed the law. "Although the majority of crack offenders are white, 80 percent of convictions fall on the shoulders of African Americans. A law that reflects such a high degree of discriminatory application needs to be fixed," he said after the vote. "This is not to say the crack cocaine is not harmful and destructive in our neighborhoods and communities. It is, and S. 1789 includes increased criminal penalties for serious drug offenders. Furthermore, this legislation does not sacrifice our law enforcement capability; it simply recalibrates the exaggerated sentencing guideline to better reflect the relative harmfulness of crack and powder cocaine."
Other members of the Congressional Black Caucus said that it was a step in the right direction, but that more needs to be done. "I would have hoped that it would have gone further. But we'll take this for the moment. I mean it's movement. We're headed in the right direction," said Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.), who, after losing his bid for Alabama governor, is a Democrat again.
"We always know that we have work to do," said Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.), "but the fact is that we have done something now that we never have been able to achieve before -- to close that disparity gap, which is really important to all our communities... This is a big deal."
Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wisc.) called it a "work in progress." "I've been elected as a member since 1988 and I've yet to vote on the perfect thing," she said. "We're down to 18 to one instead of 100 to one."
The vote comes a day after the House approved legislation -- again by voice vote; nobody wants to be on record on drug policy issues -- creating a blue ribbon commission to study the criminal justice system from top to bottom and recommend reforms. The commission was pushed through the Senate by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), whose tough-guy credentials allowed him to take on the issue of sentencing and drug-policy reform.
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of cops and judges who advocate for reform, hailed passage of both measures. "The 'war on drugs' has done nothing to reduce drug use," said the group's head, Neill Franklin, a 33-year police veteran who led multi-jurisdictional anti-narcotics task forces for the Maryland State Police. "But this failed prohibition policy has achieved some results: far too many cops killed in action, billions of tax dollars wasted, powerful and well-funded drug cartels and out-of-control violence in our cities. It's great to see our elected representatives finally beginning to address these problems, but there's still a lot more work to be done."
There are still dome dead-enders, however, unwilling to stop fighting the war. "I'm really disappointed we chose to reduce the penalties of cocaine trafficking," said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas). "The original legislation was passed 25 years ago in response to the epidemic of addiction and violence in communities across America and it worked. Violent crime is down, drug crime is down substantially since those days and one of the major reasons is because of the increase in penalties. Now we've lowered those penalties and I greatly worry that this is going to cause more cocaine trafficking, increased addictions and the destruction of more lives."
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