Retroactive drug sentencing is change we can believe in

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In August of 2010, President Obama signed into law the Fair Sentencing Act, which lowered the sentencing disparity from a 100:1 to 18:1 ratio of powder cocaine to crack cocaine (based on the number of grams in possession). The law was considered by many to be a significant step toward equity in sentencing. However, for some, the law didn’t go far enough — it would only affect decisions moving forward, leaving those who were previously convicted of crack offenses to live with their sentences unchanged.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission is now considering whether to retroactively apply the law to previously convicted inmates — a change that may reduce the sentences of approximately 12,000 people convicted of crack offenses by an average of three years. This is a change that the Department of Justice may appear to support.

In his testimony to the commission yesterday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said, “as years of experience and study have shown, there is simply no just or logical reason why their punishments should be dramatically more severe than those of other cocaine offenders.”

Civil Rights advocates agree.

“Over the last 30 years, America has pursued a one size fits all, incarceration-focused strategy to drug addiction that has resulted in the largest prison population in the world,” NAACP Criminal Justice Director Robert Rooks told TheGrio.

There is no question that crack has taken a tremendous toll on our communities and families. Our communities have been disproportionately ravaged by the effects of crack cocaine, and by the violence and incarceration that surround its distribution. Still, there has been no scientific evidence to support the belief that crack is more dangerous and addictive than powder cocaine.

Yet, since the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of the 1980s, our nation’s sentencing policy has reflected this notion — resulting in a nine-fold increase between 1985 and 2006 in the number of federal inmates who were incarcerated for drug offenses. According to the Sentencing Project, one in eight black males in his twenties is in prison; and overall, despite data that show drug use among black people as only slightly higher and drug use among Latinos as slightly lower than their white counterparts, people of color represent the majority of all people in prison for drug offenses.

The War on Drugs, which was marked by punitive and mandatory drug sentencing provisions, has also produced significant increases in the incarceration rates among women of color. For black women, there was a staggering 828 percent increase in imprisonment rates between 1986 and 1991, largely as a result of harsh mandatory sentences. In her book, Misguided Justice: The War on Drugs and the Incarceration of Black Women, Dr. Stephanie Bush-Baskette writes, “Because of the association of Black females with crack cocaine, the mandatory minimum sentencing schemes appear to be a major factor in explaining the over-representation of black females incarcerated for drug offenses…and may explain the length of prison sentences that [they] received.”

Kemba Smith Pradia can attest to that. Once a Hampton University student whose story reached national headlines in 1996 when her high school graduation photo was featured on the cover of Emerge magazine alongside her inmate number, Smith Pradia was granted clemency by President Clinton in 2000. She is now the author of the forthcoming book, Poster Child, and an active sentencing reform advocate.

“I was sentenced to 24.5 years in the fourth circuit and my case was a crack case. I was held accountable for 255 kilograms of crack cocaine even though the prosecutor stated that I didn’t handle, use or sell any of the drugs involved,” Kemba Smith Pradia told TheGrio.

In my opinion, there is no question that the U.S. Sentencing Commission should seek to amend the sentencing provisions so as to retroactively apply to qualifying inmates. However, even if four of the six commissioners agree with this notion, it is still up to Congress to modify the law such that that it serves the dual purpose of addressing America’s incarceration problem and recurring theme of relying on incarceration to deal with our nation’s medical and social issues — particularly for people of color.

“It would continue to be a grave injustice for offenders who would be affected and for their families to know that we have been fighting for them to gain relief only for them to not benefit from the change at all,” said Smith Pradia.

In the meantime, as the commission considers its next move, our challenge is to prepare our communities for a seamless and successful reentry of those who have paid their debts to society, and to ensure continued accountability and healing in communities that have been affected by both an addiction to drugs and to an addiction to the idea of incarceration as an effective remedy to substance abuse.