Beyond the Fair Sentencing Act

I think this is great! To many times have we heard the story about an innocent person or teen getting caught in between a tiny drug exchange and having their life go down the drain because of it. Now we can actually decipher between the serious offenses and mistakes. Chemical dependency counseling will play a big roll with these defendants coming out from the bigger convictions. An addictions counselor would also be a good requirement of the newly convicted. 

"This year's historic vote in Congress to scale back the harsh and racially disparate mandatory sentences for federal crack cocaine offenses was a watershed event in the long campaign for a more rational approach to drug policy. 

The Fair Sentencing Act is expected to benefit about 3,000 defendants a year, with an average sentence reduction of twenty-seven months. Defendants convicted of possessing as little as five grams of crack—the weight of two pennies—no longer receive a mandatory five years in prison, and the quantity-based sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses has been significantly reduced. The true value of the new law will be seen, however, only if it helps to open the door to more widespread drug policy reform.

The federal crack reform continues this incremental move toward more rational sentencing policies, but much work remains to be done. Drug courts, for example, have been shown to help divert low-level offenders into treatment rather than prison, but many of them impose strict criteria for admission, often focusing on cases in which prison terms would be unlikely to be imposed even without the program. School-zone drug laws, imposed with the inarguable goal of reducing drug sales to children, often apply as well to drug sales between consenting adults. This has a predictable racial impact, because large portions of densely populated urban areas, disproportionately comprising communities of color, lie within a school zone. In New Jersey, fully 96 percent of such penalties were imposed on African-Americans or Latinos, an outcome that in 2010 persuaded the legislature to restore discretion to judges in such cases.

The first test of the impact of the Fair Sentencing Act will come when the US Sentencing Commission votes on whether to apply the guideline changes retroactively to the thousands of people who committed their crack cocaine offense before the bill was signed. Along with that, the commission's report on mandatory sentencing, due out next year, may help to strengthen the argument about excessive punishments.

Ultimately, the scope of reform can be measured only by our ability to level the playing field in addressing substance abuse. While the war on drugs has been waged for decades, it is actually two very distinct wars. In well-heeled communities substance abuse is treated as a public health problem best addressed by prevention and treatment. In low-income communities of color, it is far more likely to be considered a criminal justice problem, one best addressed with more police, prosecutors and prisons. We have a better model at hand; the challenge is to implement it more broadly and equitably."

Marc Mauer

Source: http://www.thenation.com

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