Fair Sentencing Act Pros And Cons

INTRODUCTION The Fair Sentencing Act (FSA) of 2010 (Public Law 111-220) was an act by Congress, and became law on August 3, 2010 ( ). The FSA intent is to reduce the gap between the amount of crack cocaine and powder cocaine needed to initiate federal criminal penalties from a 100:1 weight ratio to an 18:1 weight ratio. The FSA also eliminates the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for the possession of crack cocaine (Reid 2012). The FSA replaced the controversial Anti-Drug Abuse Act (ADAA) of 1986, that was seen as a racially bias, expensive, and unfair legislation from the Reagan Administration's “War on Drugs” from the mid 1980s (). The ADAA had become an outdated law that revealed the popular consensus of congress at the time, that crack cocaine was a more dangerous drug than powder cocaine. In the years that followed, the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC), along with other agencies, conducted extensive research and concluded that there was no difference in the effects of the two drug forms, hence the sentencing disparity was unfair and not warranted (Gabbidon,Taylor 2005).
Further controversy surrounding the ADAA and the 100:1 ratio was the claim the law was racially biased and it directly contributed to the high percentage of African Americans receiving unfair long term prison sentences (Frankel 2010).
Legislation in response to reduce the racial disparity began in the mid-1990s, and culminated in the signing of the FSA. The FSA has been described as improving the fairness of the federal criminal justice system by prominent politicians such as, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. However, Some members of Congress are opposed to the Act. Lamar S. Smith (R-TX), the top-ranking Republican on the United States House Committee on the Judiciary, has criticized the act and argued against its passage (Bungarner
2011).
PROBLEMS AND ISSUES IDENTIFIED The obvious racial disparity in the demographics of federal crack cocaine offenders is alarming. In 2006 African-Americans were 81.8 percent of federal cocaine offenders, compared to Caucasians and Hispanics who nine percent. This statistic is even more apparent when compared to federal powder cocaine offenders, where 71.8 percent are either Caucasian or Hispanic and a mere 14.3 percent are African-American (Schuster 2012). These statistical numbers that revealed the large disparity in the statistical analysis led the USSC to conclude that the mandatory minimum crack cocaine sentences are extreme and tend to be more severe for racial minorities than other races. As a result of this inequality, it demonstrates a perception of unfairness and inconsistency, along with alack of evenhandedness, which needs to be amended (Percival 2011). The US also concluded that crack cocaine offenders tend to be concentrated in the low level functions of the drug trade than were the powder cocaine offenders. In 2005, over 55 percent of all federal crack cocaine crimes were from street dealers arrested with less than an ounce of the drug. Those street dealers who were involved in similar activities and arrested for the same amount, but were convicted of federal powder cocaine offenses was seven percent (Mazza 2006). These numbers had moving away from the main objective of the 1986 Act to target the more serious career traffickers. Huge quantities of powder cocaine were being shipped into and entering this country in its powder form. This trafficking strategy was in response to the crack cocaine laws of the United States. (Thomas 2012). The federal crack reform of the FSA intent is to move justice forward and achieve fair sentencing policies.
According to some experts it's a long way to go, and it needs to be reformed before it's considered just. One area this is apparent is in drug courts, which have proven to help place low-level offenders into drug treatment programs avoiding federal prison incarceration (Schuster 2010). Many of them treatment facilities have a strict criteria for admission. Many of the cases are ones that a prison term would most likely would not be imposed, with or without the program. School-zone drug laws, imposed with the enthusiastic goal of stopping drug sales to children. Unfortunately its unintended criminal convictions most often arrested for sales between consenting adults (Gertsman
2015). This has created a negative and predictable racial impact. Most densely populated urban areas, are primarily communities of color, and are in a school zone. In New Jersey for instance, more than 96 percent of the inhanced drug penalties were African-Americans or Latinos, a fact that in 2010, eventually persuaded the legislature to restore the authority of discretion to the presiding judge of the case ( Thomas 2011). The FSA had been welcomed by civil rights and community leaders in the beginning, but the key compromise measure did not meet the expected changes that had been sought for over two decades. The new law only reduces, but does not eliminate, the sentencing disparity that appears to be directed towards the African American community. The criticism is there are still too many of the low-level drug dealers being sentenced and incarcerated in the federal criminal justice system (Reid 2012). During this time, the bipartisan cooperation who were key to the passage of the FSA an historic political event by using intense partisan wrangling for a large range of issues on Capitol Hill and dominated the debate and were able to stymie this action (Gertsman 2015).
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Congress specifically addressed crack cocaine as part of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Among other things, the 1986 Act created statutory mandatory minimum penalties that differentiated between powder cocaine and crack cocaine. Specifically, the 1986 Act set 5- and 10-year mandatory minimum penalties for trafficking in crack and powder cocaine based on the amount of the drug. The 1986 Act required 100 times as much powder cocaine as crack cocaine to trigger the same mandatory minimum penalty; hence, the 1986 Act’s penalties are described as setting a 100-to-1 crack-to-powder drug quantity ratio. The 1986 Act’s mandatory minimum penalties were the first since the near-complete repeal of mandatory minimum in 1970 ().
In response to the 1986 Act the Commission incorporated the mandatory minimum penalties into the guidelines by setting the drug quantity thresholds in the Drug Quantity Table so as to provide base offense levels (levels 26 and 32) corresponding to guideline ranges that were above the statutory mandatory minimum penalties. Congress acted again by passing the AntiDrug Abuse Act of 1988, which among other things made first time simple possession of crack cocaine an offense punishable by a mandatory minimum penalty, the only drug so punished. In the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994(),