Last week Attorney General Eric Holder suggested that the sentencing guidelines making the crack-powder cocaine disparity less racist should be retroactive. There's no real reason why they shouldn't be--after all the Fair Sentencing Act was an acknowledgement that Congress made a mistake when it treated the drugs so differently. As Chris Cassidy pointed out in his post here, the new guidelines don't fully erase the disparity, largely because Senate Republicans arbitrarily decided to lessen it rather than eliminate it all together.
Tanya Somanader* was disappointed in Rep. Lamar Smith's reaction:
Ultimately, the prism through which many political leaders like Smith view the war on drugs is still very much driven by racial stereotypes. Through this perspective, any attempt to give a black criminal and a white criminal a slightly more equal sentence for the same crime appears to be a dangerous shift towards "political correctness" rather than parity. Thus however logical Holder's position may be, if those like Smith continue to drive the debate, his will continue to represent courage and a casualty in the war on drugs.
I'd really go farther and say that racial stereotypes are irrelevant here. When deploying the term "political correctness," usually conservatives are referring to an implied "privilege" that women or people of color have that white people do not. This privilege is almost always invented, but here Smith isn't even attacking something that could be described as "special rights," he's really just defending the idea that black people should face harsher punishments for committing similar crimes as white people.
Smith's complaint that the administration supports "releasing dangerous drug offenders" doesn't hold much water either. As Jacob Sullum points out Holder's position here would affect a very modest number of offenders, and that the administration may be taking this position in an attempt to placate Republicans.
According to the commission's analysis (PDF), retroactivity could mean shorter sentences for more than 12,000 crack offenders who are currently serving time. But Attorney General Eric Holder asked the commission to exclude prisoners who have significant criminal histories or who possessed a gun at the time of their offense, which would reduce the number of eligible inmates to about 5,500. Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, says that suggestion makes no sense, since those factors were already taken into account at sentencing.
So rather than being a real act of bravery on Holder's part, this represents the administration preemptively retreating on reasonable policy with the expectation that this will circumvent Republican demagoguery, only to find that Republicans aren't really interested enough in the details to be swayed by such gestures. What's the definition of insanity again?
Many policymakers simply haven't caught up to the idea that it's the associated problems of the drug trade, along with slow, inconsistent and draconian justice, not the use of drugs itself, that have devastating consequences. It's easy enough to recognize the crack/powder disparity as abhorrent without learning the larger lessons about how the war on drugs has failed. If, like Holder, you think The Wire needs more seasons, chances are you haven't figured that out yet.
*apologies, Tanya, not Sara, wrote that post.
