It is the end of an injustice partly responsible for the high rate of incarceration of blacks in the United States. The US Attorney General on Friday (December 16th) instructed prosecutors not to treat cocaine-related offenses differently than those involving crack cocaine.
In a directive to his office, Minister Merrick Garland said there was no reason to treat the two drugs differently. “Science simply does not show a difference between crack and cocaine, because there is no significant pharmacological difference between the two drugs”he specifies in this directive made public by the ministry.
When crack, a derivative of cocaine, swept through the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, Congress passed legislation – outlined by former senator and current president Joe Biden – establishing harsher penalties for trafficking or possession of the drug than those for cocaine.
The law provided up to five years in prison for a person in possession of 500 grams of cocaine, while it was enough to have five grams of crack to see the same penalty. Possession of crack carried a mandatory prison sentence for the first offense over five grams. She justified this disparity by the supposedly more intense impact of crack, according to the organization The Sentencing Project, which advocates alternatives to prison and denounces racial bias in sentencing in the United States.
Crack more prevalent among African Americans
At that time, crack was prevalent within the African-American community, while cocaine was more common in privileged and white neighborhoods, according to The Sentencing Project. As a result, black people were more often sentenced to long prison terms during the “crack epidemic”, inflating prison populations for long periods of time. Even today, the incarceration rate of black Americans in state prisons is almost five times higher than that of white Americans.
In 2010, a law repealed the mandatory prison sentence, but possession of crack cocaine was still judged much more harshly than possession of cocaine. In 2018, Donald Trump signed new legislation allowing crack users and dealers to appeal.
But in his memo, Merrick Garland, appointed by President Joe Biden, explained that “the difference in sentence [dans les affaires de] crack and cocaine is still responsible for unwarranted racial disparities in convictions”.
Mr. Garland added that the Biden administration supported a proposed law to change the sentences. This text was presented to Congress in January 2021 but did not progress.