as serwer sez, it's great in the 21st century that our laws are one fifth racist rather than three fifths racist like the original constitution...

Yes, and sending a drug user/dealer (generally both) to prison has worked so well in the War on Drugs.

Almost as successful as Prohibition was in stamping out using/selling alcohol. . .

"Patrick Leahy, the ranking Republican on the committee"

When did that happen?

Because the majority of crack convictions involve African Americans, while powder cocaine convictions tend to involve whites, there's also an obvious racial component to the sentencing disparity.

Cite sources, please. Because in certain areas, black gangs move as much powder cocaine as they do crack. And hispanics move much more powder cocaine than crack. Whites, of course, move more meth than crack and cocaine combined.

So unless you can back up your belief with facts, then your mentality is not based reality but Law and Order reruns.

Should have looked this up, but, haven't authors of crime novels set in DC and Baltimore written about police complaining their community policing became far more difficult as a result of this war on drugs? The communities have turned on the police due to the loss of their youth. This is akin to the typical 10 year sentences handed out reguraly to former slaves in the South, so, that the private penal systems could flourish and cut state expenditures.

the private penal systems could flourish and cut state expenditures
You got sources for this? It's been my understanding that private prisons increase public expenditures, but line the pockets of big campaign contributors.

Try readin' "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander -- at the Nation site or at Tomdispatch -- if you want to know comprehensively what an apartheid country the United States is.

Tutter,

The only premise was that blacks move a lot more crack.
This doesn't conflict with any of your observations.

The stream of logic is not inconsistent.
Blacks move as much powder as crack, but do whites move a lot less crack thus linking big sentences far more often to blacks?

Don't know, but your facts don't conflict.

Chill, Tutter. Steve's comment was inartfully worded but no grounds for a triple-dog dare.

Whites aren't as involved with crack cocaine as they are in powder. As a result, if a white person is convicted of a cocaine-related crime, chances are it involved powder, and not crack.

That doesn't mean that MORE whites than blacks are involved with powder-cocaine-related crimes (even though Steve is claiming more blacks are involved with crack-related convictions than whites, and I would suspect he's right despite never having watched a complete episode of Law and Order). It just means, as I wrote, if a white person is convicted of dealing or using cocaine, it was probably powder.

What does this sentence mean: "Under the new bill, it would take 28 grams of crack cocaine to trigger a mandatory minimum sentence to 28 grams"?

Is that supposed to read "Under the new bill, it would take 28 grams of crack cocaine to trigger a mandatory minimum sentence equivalent to that triggered by 500 grams of powder cocaine"?

Well, I guess that's a start.

Getting back to my original point, my liberally bleeding heart notwithstanding, I wouldn't have minded if instead of raising the amount of crack one has to be handling to get a stiffer sentence, they LOWERED the amount of powder cocaine one has to be handling to get a stiffer sentence. I know, drug addiction is a disease and all that, but I also know that most money generated from the sale of drugs isn't going into improving our schools roads or libraries. It's going to people involved in crime who will use quite a bit of it to commit more crime. I know and understand the mentality that we should treat drug addiction as an illness and not a crime, but it is still a crime to have the drugs and use the drugs. If you willingly go to get help, your addiction shouldn't be used against you by Justice to obtain a conviction, but if you're caught with drugs, you're caught committing a crime, and it should be treated as such. Its one area where I tend to be more conservative than most others on this board, I suspect, but it's how I feel. But I also think if there was a sudden influx of white kids going to prison for handling tiny recreational amounts of cocaine, there'd be a greater push for better drug education so white people's children won't go to jail, which would trickle down (hopefully) into ALL children being better educated about drug use and not going to jail. Not just using the threat of prison as a deterrence to the users, but as an incentive to parents to do more to educate and protect their children.

let's not get all happy that justice is on the horizon here... just who do you think the police mostly concentrate on when it comes to arrests, and the courts when it comes to convictions?

however many grams to grams this particular racist law is modified, it is still the case that whitey gets all kinds of slack while black men still get sent "up the river."

These are possession charges. It is assumed that anybody who has more than 500 grams of powder is in the business of selling. Why it is assumed that anybody with 5 grams of crack is selling defies common sense. Clearly the law was intended to let white guy users caught with less than 500 grams of powder off the hook (probably diverted) while incarcerating users of 5 or more grams of crack. The law is clearly aimed at putting users of crack away while diverting users of powder. That has the racist element. Nobody says we shouldn't be putting dealers of either away for a long time.

We've been dealing with an indefensible 100-to-1 ratio -- a person caught selling five grams of crack will face the same mandatory minimum sentence as someone selling 500 grams of powder cocaine.

Well yeah. Cocaine's a lot better.

"Sentencing disparities when it comes to cocaine have long been a national embarrassment. We've been dealing with an indefensible 100-to-1 ratio -- a person caught selling five grams of crack will face the same mandatory minimum sentence as someone selling 500 grams of powder cocaine."

Mr. Benen,

You do realize that the increased penalities for those dealing crack versus powder cocaine was due to the demands of the Congressional Black Caucus, specifically Charlie Rangel. Perhaps you don't remember but back in the 80's there was a "crack epidemic" going on in the Black community and the CBC wanted to use increased penalities because those dealing crack were walking due to the little amount of powdered cocaine that is present in crack.

Under what passes for liberal "logic", I guess this make Rangel and the rest of the CBC racists for wanting to enact a law that has resulted in such a racial disparity against minorities. lol

Cap'n Chucky, I was referring to the post Civil War days in the South. It became far cheaper for state and local governments to contract private penal systems than to have the state provide services. Those systems built roads, railroads, levees, ran agri operations with cheap labor prisoners. I will find the source, but, the point was that at that time a white would be sentenced to a fraction of what a former slave would receive. 10 years for the "freed" slave would often be the norm, while, the white would serve less than a year. By using private systems, the state and local governments didn't have to set up more elaborate departments of their own. There may be a tie-in the present private penal system, used today, but, I was speaking of the discrepancies of those post Civil War years. This system, also, helped destroy the family, which, of course, was used to disparage them by holier than whites who claimed the blacks were shiftless and refused to be proper fathers and raise families. Yeah, throw them in jail for looking at any white woman and then denounce them for not providing for their families.

Cap'n Chucky, Suggest you peruse:

"The Convict Lease System" by Frederick Douglas, or "Worse then slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice" by David M Oshinsky, or, Slavery by Another Name" by Douglas Blackmon, or "Convicts as Capital - Thomas O'Conner and teh leases of the Tennessee Penitentiary System" by Rebecca H Moulder.

berttheclock: duly noted, and thanks for the info.

The CBC and Rangel in particular have long recognized that they were in error and that the only effect of jacking up the crack levels was to ensure that African American men were disproportionately sentenced to impossibly long prison terms If anyone wants a lovely case study in how the drug war plays out in African American communities, look up Tulia TX on the internet. The fact that this hasn't been dealt with and the best they can do is to get to 20 - 1 instead of 1 - 1 is a true shame on the nation. What an embarrassment.