![]() “But this is one area where there is bipartisan support and where politicians say they messed up.” “That’s something that you don’t see happen very often, is the government essentially admitting that they were wrong,” said Maritza Perez, the director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. Now, a small group of lawmakers - a bipartisan one in the House, and two Democrats in the Senate - wants to do away with the disparity altogether and provide the opportunity for retroactive sentence reduction. The disparity has been diluted by Congress over the last decade - the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act reformed the disparity to be 18 to 1 instead of 100 to 1, and the 2018 First Step Act made the reform retroactive, allowing people incarcerated for crack offenses to apply for resentencing under the new law. (Though an Asbury Park Press study found that Black usage of crack was only slightly higher than white usage, crack has been stereotypically associated with Black people while powder cocaine is thought of as a richer, whiter drug.) Five grams of crack mandated a five-year sentence - 500 grams of powder cocaine was required to trigger the same sentence. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act created a 100 to 1 disparity between the amount of crack cocaine that triggers a federal mandatory minimum sentence versus powder cocaine. The cocaine sentencing disparity is one of the most notable and obvious manifestations of the racist impact of these laws. Instead, these policies ushered in an era of mass incarceration, incited exorbitant federal cost, and have promoted wholly racist outcomes in which one of every three Black boys are expected to go to prison in their lifetimes, compared to just one in every 17 white boys, according to research from the ACLU. ![]() ![]() Mandatory minimums, three-strike rules, and expanded felony classifications were not responsible for drops in the crime rate and have not significantly reduced drug use. Over 25 years after the 1994 Crime Bill and 35 years after the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the War on Drugs is considered by experts and government officials alike to be one of the biggest failures of American governance in the 20th century. “Three strikes? How about two strikes? How about one strike? We couldn’t be punitive enough to satisfy what we thought was public anger about crime and drugs.” “You couldn’t go far enough,” said Ring, who’s now the president of sentencing reform organization Families Against Mandatory Minimums. As he remembers it, members of both parties were obsessed with appearing tough on crime. Kevin Ring worked on Capitol Hill during the crafting of the 1994 Crime Bill, which imposed tougher prison sentences and bolstered the War on Drugs. ![]()
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