5 Years Later, Here Are 5 Ways the Fair Sentencing Act Changed the War on Drugs

[eridani]

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/08/03/fair-sentencing-act-anniversary

Presidential candidates, celebrities, and billionaires have recently been trumpeting the need for criminal justice reform in the U.S., but five years ago today—when the movement for reform had far fewer big-ticket proponents—President Barack Obama signed a landmark law to change drug sentencing laws. The Fair Sentencing Act reduced the massive disparity between sentences handed down to crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenders, and in the years since its implementation, the number of federal prosecutions of crack cocaine offenders has been cut in half.

Even though crack and powder cocaine are byproducts of the same drug, prior to the Fair Sentencing Act an individual caught with 5 grams of crack would face a 10-year sentence, while it would take 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same mandatory minimum sentence. Under the act, that gap was reduced from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1—meaning crack cocaine sentences are now 18 times harsher than powder cocaine sentences rather than 100 times.

Perhaps what was most harmful about the disparity was the way it perpetuated racial disparities in sentencing, landing more black Americans behind bars for crack possession. Driven by a rise in crack cocaine use in the 1980s—owing largely to its lower price—poor black communities were hardest hit by federal crack laws. In 2010, 79 percent of sentenced crack offenders were black, in spite of research that indicates two-thirds of all crack users were white or Hispanic.