The law so far provided for much heavier penalties for offenders taken in possession of crack, an inequality of treatment which were mainly victims of African-Americans.
mo12345lemonde with AFP
This is the end of an injustice responsible in part for the high rate of incarceration of blacks in the United States. The United States Minister of Justice gave prosecutors on Friday, December 16, not to deal with the authors of cocaine -related crimes differently and those involving crack.
In a directive addressed to his services, Minister Merrick Garland said there was no reason to treat the two drugs differently. “Science simply does not demonstrate any difference between crack and cocaine, because there is no significant pharmacological difference between the two drugs,” he said in this directive made public by the ministry.
When crack, a derivative of cocaine, swept through the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, the Congress adopted a law – whose contours were drawn by the former senator and current president Joe Biden – Setting up more severe sentences for traffic or possession of this drug, than those in force 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 be inflicted the same sentence. Crack possession led to a compulsory prison sentence for the first offense on more than five grams. It 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 biases in the pronouncement of sentences in the United States
Crack more widespread among African-Americans
At that time, crack was widespread 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 condemned to long imprisonment penalties for “the cracus epidemic”, inflating prison populations for long periods. Even today, the rate of incarceration of black Americans in the prisons of states is almost five times higher than that of American whites.
In 2010, a law repealed the penalty of compulsory imprisonment, but the possession of crack was still deemed much more severely than that of cocaine. In 2018, Donald Trump signed a new legislative text allowing Crack consumers and traffickers to call on.
But in his memo, Merrick Garland, appointed by President Joe Biden, explained that “the difference in pain [in the affairs of] Crack and cocaine is still responsible for unjustified racial disparities in the convictions”.
m. Garland added that Biden administration supported a bill to modify the sentences. This text was presented at the congress in January 2021 but did not progress.