Obama seeks crack cocaine sentence changes

[sabra]

Source: MSNBC

Congress urged to equalize penalty, correct racial disparity

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration joined a federal judge Wednesday in urging Congress to end a racial disparity by equalizing prison sentences for dealing and using crack versus powdered cocaine.

"Jails are loaded with people who look like me," U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, an African-American, told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing.

Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said the administration believes Congress' goal "should be to completely eliminate the disparity" between the two forms of cocaine. "A growing number of citizens view it as fundamentally unfair," Breuer testified.

It takes 100 times more powdered cocaine than crack cocaine to trigger the same harsh mandatory minimum sentences.

Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30479677/

[LittleOne]

1. About Freaking Time

It isn't fair that the "poor" drug gets you more time than the "rich" drug.

[L. Coyote]

12. Restore voting rights too!!!

[mucifer]

2. Thank G-d! This was a major Bill Clinton f- up. It's about time it's being addressed.

[imdjh]

3. The real issue isn't power versus rock

The real issue is the way it's dealt, the nature of the customer and dealer, and the impact on the community.

[mucifer]

4. the real deal is race. After they changed the law lots of non violent people of color

went to prison for many years.

[LittleOne]

6. No Shit

After my repub neighbor said some dumb ass things about this I went and did some research. For every 20 whites that go to jail for drugs in Illinois there are 1120 blacks. And if you are black don't even bother going to the Dakotas they meet you at the border and throw you in jail.

It comes down to poverty and and power. Blacks get the poverty and the whites get the power. But as long as my dealer drives a Porsche and I do a line behind closed doors and pay my taxes then it must be OK. Pity the 80's are so over for me.

[imdjh]

8. You touched on it slightly, but had to go over the top

The two drugs only co-existed for a short period of time in practicality. While there are probably some people still using powder, it doesn't enjoy the status or social acceptance it once did. The two drugs are decidedly different in how they present to society, and while race may be a noticeable factor it's not the determining factor in the sense that it's portrayed.

Cocaine's heyday was a sophisticated one. Cocaine was dealt by realtors, bartenders, construction workers and all sorts of people in all sorts of occupations. The cocaine dealer who did nothing but sell cocaine was at the top rather than the bottom of the business. Powdered cocaine dealers didn't work on the streets selling to passing cars, using kids to "run" for them, gunning each other down. It probably happened to some degree, but not the degree that the worst effects of drug dealing are the defining aspect of crack dealing. People of all races could be found in the cocaine dealing and use of of the powder era, as they probably can to this day, but crack went straight for the economic bottom rung as it was reportedly designed to do.

Let's consider the implications of these crack cocaine laws, who passed them, and how they are viewed in retrospect. If the people behind them were truly racist, then why would they care if black people wanted to kill each other, destroy their neighborhoods, etc? It's not like crack was predicted to work its way into the middle class and upper class like powder had- then as now crack was considered a gutter drug.

Powder and rock are two different items, even if they have some chemistry in common. A picture of Paris HIlton snorting coke off David Geffen's coffee table is going to have a much different response than a picture of her toking on a crack pipe. In 1984 a coke whore was something completely different than what we think of when we say crack whore. Crack may be more chemically similar to powdered cocaine than it is to meth, but culturally crack is the equivalent of meth, not powdered cocaine.

None of which is to say that the sentence for possession of a gram of crack or a gram of coke shouldn't be the same, simply that it's not all about race and it never was.

[mucifer]

9. non violent drug offenses are non violent drug offenses.

Some of this is cause and effect. Prison is a great school to learn how to be violent.

[mucifer]

10. I agree check this out:

Too Little Too Late : President Clinton's Prison Legacy: Bill Clinton
The Incarceration President

When William Jefferson Clinton took office in 1993, he was
embraced by some as a moderate change from the previous twelve
years of tough on crime Republican administrations. Now, eight
years later, the latest criminal justice statistics show that it was
actually Democratic President Bill Clinton who implemented
arguably the most punitive platform on crime in the last two decades.
In fact, “tough on crime” policies passed during the Clinton
Administration’s tenure resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison
inmates of any president in American history.

Although Republicans are normally thought to hold the tough on crime mantle, in
President Clinton’s first-term (1992-1996), 148,000 more state and federal prisoners
were added than under President Reagan’s first term (1980-1984), and 34,000 more
than were added under President Bush’s four-year term (1988-1992) snip..


http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:4h3hwtqE9uAJ:www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/01-02_REP_TooLittleTooLate_AC.pdf+cjcj+Clinton+nonviolent+drug+offenses&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

[heronkid]

11. decriminalize drugs now

regulate the drugs, tax them like tobacco & booze and let's get our people out of jail.

[Hekate]

5. Interesting typo: "power versus rock". It is about power, isn't it? nt

[imdjh]

7. sometimes a typo is just a typo n/t

[Igel]

13. "lawmakers erred in assuming that violence would be greater among those using crack"

Actually, that wasn't an assumption. Durbin makes it sound as though things were placid and somebody came up with a prediction, rooted in baseless assumptions, that crack cocaine would yield more violence.

The reality is that the law was passed *after* it was fairly evident that crack and powder cocaine sales and use were playing out substantially differently in the two communities. Powder cocaine didnt' yield the concentrated societal dysfunction that crack cocaine--the claim was--was producing.

The degree of dysfunction's reduced; the purpose of the law has either been met or resolved on its own. That doesn't change what the actual discussion in the '80s was, or why the law was enacted.