The New York Times

Wednesday, July 23, 1997

Rationality in crack Sentencing

President Clinton took a step toward fairer in drug sentencing yesterday when he proposed narrowing the disparity that treats crimes involving crack cocaine, popular in poor black neighborhoods, 100 times as harshly as crimes involving powdered cocaine, popular among whites. The change had been recommended by Attorney General Janet Reno and the White House drug policy director. The

Challenge now is to persuade Congress, which established the extreme 100-to-1 sentencing ratio 11 years ago, to rectify its mistake.

Present law obliges judges to impose the same y mandatory five-year minimum sentence on defendants convicted of selling 5 grams of crack or 500 grams of powder, even though the two are chemically similar. Crack's greater association with violent street crime hardly justifies such a huge disparity, and that association is diminishing. Moreover, critics and many Federal judges hive questioned the five-gram crack threshold, since it punishes low-level dealers as harshly as those at a high level, and hits black more severely than whites.

The real question is whether there should be any harsher penalties at all for crack than for powdered cocaine. The White House drug Official, Barry McCaffrey, favors eliminating the disparity altogether. However, the proposal-he and Ms Reno made to Mr. Clinton calls for a minimum prison term of five years for selling either 25 grams of crack or 250 -grams of powdered cocaine, reducing the disparity to 10 to 1.

In recommending this change, Ms. Reno and Mr. McCaffrey noted that crack, use has stabilized and that crack-associated violence has decrease. They also recognized the danger of turning a blind eye to a disparity that "has become an import symbol of racial injustice in our criminal justice system." By now, so should Congress.