Jonathan Easley interviews Criminal Justice Policy Foundation President Eric Sterling about the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which ushered in the harsh drug penalties that have lead to American prisons holding fully one percent of the population:
Anyway, there was no conversation to determine if crack was even more dangerous than cocaine, or what quantity a mid-level crack dealer might carry in comparison to a mid-level cocaine dealer. It was a seat-of-the-pants judgment from this one narc about what the drug trade in one part of the country might have looked like at that moment in time.
[...]
And those were last-minute items thrown into the first bill that was passed by the House. At the time, the Senate was controlled by Strom Thurmond and the Republicans. They looked at it and said: "OK, well if the Democrats have a sentence of five years to 20 years, let's up it to 10 years to 40 years. And if the Dems say 20 grams, we’ll make it 5!” Nobody looked at the proper ratios based on how harmful it was. It was completely detached from science. Nobody could say that crack was 100 times more dangerous than powder.
I know Sterling didn't mean this that way, but the idea that old timey segregationist Thurmond was involved might leave folks with the wrong impression about the origins of these sentencing policies. The fact was that crack panic had gripped many black leaders as firmly as everyone else, and the belief that it was some kind of nigh-supernatural demon drug lead the Congressional Black Caucus to support the bill, unaware of the real nature of crack or the harm the law would ultimately do. It was precisely because crack seemed to be so prevalent in black communities that black legislators supported the tougher penalties. That doesn't mean that race had nothing to do with the origins of the penalties and it certainly doesn't let people off the hook for the racist "bio-underclass" arguments associated with crack, but as Sterling notes, originally this was more a failure of competence and ideology than anything else.
Now when the effects of the drug war became more apparent and people remained indifferent, that's a different story.
