ROCK – POWDER – PRISON – HYPOCRISY –
March 19, 2021 – (Though an Asbury Park Press study found that Black usage of crack was only slightly higher than white usage, crack has been stereotypically associated with Black people while powder cocaine is thought of as a richer, whiter drug.) The disparity has been diluted by Congress over the last decade — the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act reformed the disparity to be 18 to 1 instead of 100 to 1, and the 2018 First Step Act made the reform retroactive, allowing people incarcerated for crack offenses to apply for resentencing under the new law. Now, a small group of lawmakers — a bipartisan one in the House, and two Democrats in the Senate — wants to do away with the disparity altogether and provide the opportunity for retroactive sentence reduction.
“That’s something that you don’t see happen very often, is the government essentially admitting that they were wrong,” said Maritza Perez, the director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. “But this is one area where there is bipartisan support and where politicians say they messed up.”
The Eliminating a Quantifiably Unjust Application of the Law (EQUAL) Act represents the original aim of the Fair Sentencing Act, before it was negotiated down to lessen instead of eliminate the disparity and leave out retroactivity in order to pass with bipartisan support, Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), a cosponsor of the EQUAL Act and an original sponsor of the House version of the Fair Sentencing Act, told Vox.
While those earlier bills were enormously bipartisan, there’s no guarantee the EQUAL Act passes the evenly divided Senate, given this exact proposal was watered down in earlier attempts. Right now, no Republicans in the upper chamber have signed on board, let alone the 10 it would take to overcome the filibuster. But if it does pass, advocates are hoping the EQUAL Act can be the launching point for a host of legislation combating racism. “Criminal justice reform can bring together the left and the right, progressives and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, the NAACP and the Koch brothers, the ACLU and the Heritage Foundation and all points in between,” Jeffries said in a statement. “As I said when we passed the First Step Act three years ago, it was not the end. It was not even the beginning of the end.”
Rice-Minus said she expects more Republicans to sign on to the bill quickly in the House because Reps. Don Bacon (R-NE) and Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) have already cosponsored it. But in a statement to Vox, Bacon was less optimistic about the timeline, even as he said that eliminating the cocaine sentencing disparity is only one part of a broader justice reform push he wants to tackle. “While I am optimistic it will be voted on in the House this Congress, I don’t have a projected timeline for the bill at this stage and hope to gain more bipartisan support as it makes its way through the legislative process,” he said.
