The Obama administration said it favors shorter jail sentences for crimes involving crack cocaine.
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Under current law, a person caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine gets the mandatory minimum sentence of five years, while it takes only five grams of crack cocaine to trigger the same sentence.
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“Our stance on this is we shouldn’t be lowering the penalties on crack. We’ve always talked about bringing the powder-cocaine penalties up,” said Gene Voegtlin of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which includes 20,000 police chiefs and executives.
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“We believe the remedy would be to increase the penalties for powder cocaine so all criminals are treated equally,” said James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents about 325,000 uniformed officers.
The whole story by Gary Fields in the Wall Street Journal.
I don’t want to overstate this point, but I would like to place it on the table: I don’t think there’s much difference between powdery crack cocaine and clumpy powder cocaine. And lab tests don’t distinguish between the two because they’re both cocaine.
I pity the man who gets caught in the ghetto with 5 grams of powder cocaine in a crack vile or two.