First I would like to thank all of the organizers and activists who have been tirelessly working to eliminate the disparity between crack and cocaine in terms of sentencing over the past three decades. Today your work has begun to pay dividends. Lois Aherns of the Real Costs of Prisons explained Congress’s actions this way and characterized it as a step in the right direction:

Now the 5 year mandatory minimum sentence for crack is 5 grams. After the Bill becomes law, it is raised to 28 grams. After the Bill is signed into law 50 grams of crack is raised to 280 grams for a 10 year mandatory minimum sentence.

Now a 5 year mandatory minimum sentence for powder cocaine is 500 grams —this stays the same.
Now a 10 year mandatory minimum sentence for powder cocaine is 5
kilograms—this stays the same.

The quantity disparity between crack and powder cocaine would move from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1. The law is NOT retroactive.

I agree with Lois that this is in fact a step in the right direction. The Sentencing Project estimates that “3,000 defendants would benefit from sentencing changes each year.” This is of course a good thing.

However, I can’t help but to continue to feel exasperated with political leaders who can’t just see INJUSTICE and end it. I echo the sentiment of Adam Serwer who tweeted:

Whew, fair sentencing act, making the crack disparity only one fifth as racist as it used to be, heading to the president’s desk.

This is honestly not meant on my part to denigrate the importance of this legislative win or to minimize the very hard work of activists but rather to highlight how much farther we still have to go to uproot structural racism in this country.

Recently Bill Quigley posted a blog that has been widely circulated on the bloggosphere. He opens this way:

The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.

Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below I set out numerous examples of these facts.

He then goes on to offer 14 illustrations of the endemic racism within the U.S. criminal legal system. Here are the first four examples:

One. The US has seen a surge in arrests and putting people in jail over the last four decades. Most of the reason is the war on drugs. Yet whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales, at roughly comparable rates – according to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May 2008. While African Americans comprise 13% of the US population and 14% of monthly drug users they are 37% of the people arrested for drug offenses – according to 2009 Congressional testimony by Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project.

Two. The police stop blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. In New York City, where people of color make up about half of the population, 80% of the NYPD stops were of blacks and Latinos. When whites were stopped, only 8% were frisked. When blacks and Latinos are stopped 85% were frisked according to information provided by the NYPD. The same is true most other places as well. In a California study, the ACLU found blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than whites.

Three. Since 1970, drug arrests have skyrocketed rising from 320,000 to close to 1.6 million according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice.

African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates 2 to 11 times higher than the rate for whites – according to a May 2009 report on disparity in drug arrests by Human Rights Watch.

Four. Once arrested, blacks are more likely to remain in prison awaiting trial than whites. For example, the New York state division of criminal justice did a 1995 review of disparities in processing felony arrests and found that in some parts of New York blacks are 33% more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than whites facing felony trials.

We just need to remember that structural racism is alive and well in the PIC even as we celebrate wins like the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.