Practical Politics
Cracking the metal bars: Crack and powder sentencing
This November 2, it will not be the Whitman-Brown gubernatorial contest, nor the various Assembly, State Senate and United States Congressional races that will draw a giant public voting response in California. For too many citizens and residents in the Golden State, there is only exhaustion, boredom and frustration with politics-as-usual; only the names seem to change.
What will seduce a possible record turnout for mid-term, non-presidential elections in the state will be Prop. 19, the marijuana legalization initiative, aka, the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of California. If passed, it is supposed to be, at minimum, a $1.5 billion annual income producer for local municipalities and the state. Probably, in good economic times, the initiative would be a very difficult sell, with the stereotypic visions of gangster ganja and ‘reefer madness’ still alive among us.
In our present financial circumstances—including too high unemployment and state IOUs still being the norm in selected state monetary affairs—now is really the best time for Prop. 19 advocates to prevail, and they very well may.
Just as a reminder, California is already one of the leading states in legalizing marijuana, having passed Prop. 215 in 1996 for medical uses of the weed, and several other municipal ordinances for personal cultivation of Mary Jane.
Earlier this year in Los Angeles, the sudden, explosive growth of head shops—and the opening of several marijuana dispensary machines—stayed in the headlines for several months, and still lurks close by as a newsworthy story virtually anytime news is slow.
But in the year of concessions of failure for America’s War on Drugs, a companion piece of drug-related legislation has quietly eased on and is gently going off the stage with a minimum of fanfare. That low-key approach, however, belies the tremendous importance of this first major step-outside New York itself—to reduce and then eliminate the massive unintended consequences (well, we hope unintended) of the Rockefeller Drug Laws and their federal/state corollaries.
In the early 1970s, then-New York governor Nelson Rockefeller instituted a series of draconian laws to squelch the rising violence and public danger of drug-related crimes in his state. One of those laws established a highly disproportionate arrest, punishment and sentencing cycle for crack cocaine versus powder cocaine, with the former giving thousands of first-time users of five grams or less of crack mandatory minimums of 15 years to life, while 500 grams of powder got one to five years, if not plea bargained away. Crack cocaine has been and is still mainly identified with Black and Latino users and dealers, while powder is seen as a sporting drug for mainly Whites.
In March 2009, under Gov. David Paterson, New York finally reduced such disparity to a common sense reasonableness and also reduced, but not eliminated, the severity of associated punishments. New York still has miles to go in dealing with the primary reason most Blacks and Latinos are in the New York state prison system.
The primary point to be made here, however, is that the Rockefeller laws became the very face and image of America’s War on Drugs. Those laws heavily influenced other states to pass similar regulations, and they were key to establishing the federal mandatory minimums for drug-related offenses. At the federal level—responsible for nearly three quarters of a million Black and Latino drug convictions—a five gram crack possession (five grams weighs less than four pennies) and conviction would get first time users five years in the federal pen, while it took 500 grams of powder cocaine to result in that same sentence. Essentially, the disparity in crack and powder cocaine sentencing at the federal level is currently 100-to-1, and that fact, along with many similar state statues, represents a prime pillar of the prison industrial complex regularly excoriated by Professor Angela Davis and so many others. It is a blatant unfairness and a major cause of the exploding Black prison population (and subsequently tied to the enormous increase in HIV/AIDs in African American women because Black men too frequently come out of prison on the down low and infected with the virus).
Just last week, the U.S. passed a bipartisan piece of legislation to complete the effort started in the House that now sits on President Barack Obama’s desk. He is slated to sign it either this week or early next week. That legislation, called the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, directly eliminates mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine possession immediately, and gives judges much more discretion in sentencing. It also increases the amount which triggers a sentence for drug dealing to at least 28 grams of crack, rather than the old amount of five grams. Of course, like virtually all federal legislation, it is not perfect. It does not eliminate the disparities entirely—it moves from the 100-to-1 level to 18-to-1, and that is real progress, and it is not retroactive. Those in prison on the old standards will stay there unless their lawyers can get reconsideration for medical or model prisoner reasons.
But as in other major, profound legal changes shepherded in by President Obama’s administration, this legislative act is earth-shaking, particularly for the Black community, deep in danger of having half-a-generation of African American males and females imprisoned, socially crippled, disenfranchised, and politically trashed.
As most of us know only too well, getting a paying job—decent or not—for a former felon is still tremendously difficult, as is reuniting with family and community, and having voting rights returned is still very iffy in more than 20 states.
Add this to President Obama’s “Change has come to America” list of accomplishments. It still needs work, but it is much more than one small step forward for us all.
David Horne, Ph.D., is executive director of the California African American Political Economic Institute (CAAPEI) located at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
DISCLAIMER: The beliefs and viewpoints expressed in opinion pieces, letters to the editor, by columnists and/or contributing writers are not necessarily those of Our Weekly.
In one of the largest Pan African/African American Studies departments in the country—at California State University, Northridge—I just had a conversation with three of my classes over whether African American History Month still had relevancy, or whether it had simply become obsolete.
Rather shockingly though, most students—Black, White, Latino and Asian—readily said Black History Month should continue, that there was real sociopolitical value in its continuation.
The African Union invited the African Diaspora to join it in determining the future of the African continent. That future will include becoming the Union of African States or the United States of Africa. That is, the current 55 African countries being organized as one nation of 55 federated states.
Boy, maybe it’s just me, but January 2012 is turning out to be a transitional doorway for a substantial number of those who have spent an enormous portion of their time here contributing mightily to the growth and expansion of our human engagement and civilization in diverse ways.
In a lot of ways, today’s political process is a crucible of American-style politics. This is better than Poly Sci 101 for those who pay even mild attention. The relationship between the tripartite branches of the federal government, and the continuing cries of the states for expanded usage of the 10th Amendment, demonstrate much better than any university video or college classroom slides how the government actually works, rather than how it is supposed to work.
There are those who still say the creation of America’s 10 national holiday in 1983—i.e., the kind that means post offices, banks, schools, and libraries close and federal workers get the day off—was a reparations gift of White guilt for the long years of making Black Americans suffer.
Perhaps.
