In an announcement made this week before the American Bar Association, Attorney General Eric Holder called for reform in sentencing for low-level non-violent drug offenders.
He said that current policies have “had a destabilizing effect on particular communities, largely poor and of color.”
Holder’s announcement comes after decades of rapid expansion of federal prisons across the nation due to the “war on drugs” started under the Reagan administration which saw thousands of low-income offenders of color spend a disproportionate amount of time in jail based on discriminatory sentencing in cases of crack cocaine as opposed to powder cocaine.
The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 penalized those found guilty in possession of crack to a sentencing ratio of 100:1, meaning someone who was found to have 500 grams of powder cocaine was sentenced to a mandatory sentence of five years in prison. However, someone found to have only five grams of crack (rock cocaine) would be held to the same sentence.
In a 2009 report by the Washington Post, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said, “The sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine has contributed to the imprisonment of African-Americans at six times the rate of whites and to the United States’ position as the world’s leader in incarcerations.”
In an effort to rectify these long-standing injustices in the nation’s judicial system, conservatives such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich have also called for reform in U.S. prison policy, due in large part to the fact that prison costs are a huge burden on state budgets.
Indiana’s answer to the growing costs of prison operation was to introduce lower sentences for nonviolent offenses. In a study done by the Council of State Governments Justice Center, it was found that Indiana’s prison population had grown 41 percent between 2000 and 2009.
In April of this year, the Indiana Senate voted 46 to 4 in favor of a sentencing reform bill that would reduce sentences for non-violent offenders, but also force violent criminals to serve a larger portion of their time by lowering the amount of “good time” served that could be removed from their original sentence.
In his “Smart on Crime” plan, Attorney General Holder calls for five principles that will help bring sentencing disparity to an end. The principles include information on prioritizing prosecutions, alternatives to incarceration, and improving reentry efforts to curb repeat offenses.
Recently, a forum held at the Julia Carson Government Center drew hundreds of people seeking to have their criminal records expunged under Indiana’s second chance law. The second chance law is for those who have been charged with Class D felonies not resulting in the injury of another person.
It is the hope of Attorney General Holder and others that these recent changes can radically decrease a prison system that has a population that is “outsized and unnecessarily large.”
