As you might have heard, yesterday the House passed a bill addressing the inequities in sentencing between possession of crack cocaine and powder cocaine. Yay! Oh wait...
It's never easy, politically, to lower criminal sentences. But a compromise earlier this year between Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions finally got the ball rolling. Their proposal, adopted today by the House, narrowed the gap between criminal penalties for crack and powder cocaine to 18 to 1 from the old 100 to 1 ratio...
Well, that's progress, right? We should be thanking Jeff Sessions for acknowledging that someone convicted of possessing a drug used mostly by black people should only be punished 18 times as severely as someone convicted of possessing a functionally identical drug used mostly by white people.
Just for a bit of context, consider that in last year alone, the NYPD conducted 574,304 "stop and frisk" greetings of New Yorkers. Fifty-five percent of the people cops thought looked a little fishy and decided to pat down were black, 32 percent were Hispanic, and weirdly, only 10 percent were white.
I'm guessing that because of this new day in sentencing, the police in Scarsdale will now start doing routine "stop and frisks" of young white men, because something tells me there's a fair bit of coke being done there. But maybe not.
-- Paul Waldman
