SOURCE:New York Times

Congress Reduces Drug Sentence Gap
By ERIK ECKHOLM
Published: July 28, 2010

Congress passed a bill on Wednesday that would reduce the disparities between mandatory sentences for crack and powdered cocaine violations, a step toward ending what legal experts say have been unfairly harsh punishments imposed mainly on blacks.

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Under the current law, adopted in 1986 after a surge in crack smoking and drug-related murders, someone convicted of possession of five grams of crack must be sentenced to at least five years in prison, and possession of 10 grams requires a 10-year minimum sentence. With powdered cocaine, the threshold amounts for those mandatory sentences are 100 times as high.

In the bill passed on Wednesday, the amount of crack that would invoke a five-year minimum sentence is raised to 28 grams, said to be roughly the amount a dealer might carry, and for a 10-year sentence, 280 grams....

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Personally, while I think that selling poisons of any kind qualifies as a crime, what a person ingests, injects, inhales or excretes of their own accord is not properly classified as a criminal offense. Crimes are acts that cause injury or harm to another person. That the manufacturers of mind-altering chemicals resent the competition from stuff that grows on its own, is not a justification for defining a criminal act.

On the other hand, considering that the number of persons sent to prison by this Congressional reform will serve to reduce the prison population more than the reduction in violent crime already has, we need to be concerned about the effect on the revenue stream of privatized prisons that are run for a profit. Detainees and "illegal immigrants" should not be looked upon as an alternate population to occupy empty prison beds.