(Washington) The US Department of Justice instructed US prosecutors on Friday not to treat cocaine and crack cocaine offenders differently, after decades of disparity in which African Americans have been imprisoned more often and longer than white people in the United States.
In a directive to his office, Attorney General Merrick Garland said there was no reason to treat the two drugs differently.
“Science simply does not demonstrate a difference between crack and cocaine, because there is no significant pharmacological difference between the two drugs,” he specifies in this directive made public by the ministry.
When crack, a derivative of cocaine, swept through the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, Congress passed legislation – the outlines of which were drawn by former senator and current president Joe Biden – putting in place harsher penalties for trafficking or possession of the drug than those for cocaine.
The law provided for up to five years in prison for a person in possession of 500 grams of cocaine, when it was enough to have five grams of crack to receive the same sentence, and justified this disparity by the greater impact intensity of crack, according to The Sentencing Project.
Possession of crack carried a mandatory prison sentence for the first offense over five grams.
At that time, crack was prevalent within the African-American community, while cocaine was more common in privileged and white neighborhoods, according to The Sentencing Project.
As a result, black people were more often sentenced to long prison terms during the “crack epidemic”, inflating prison populations for long periods of time.
In 2010, a law repealed the mandatory prison sentence, but possession of crack cocaine was still judged much more harshly than possession of cocaine. In 2018, Donald Trump signed new legislation allowing crack users and dealers to appeal.
But in his memo, Merrick Garland, appointed by President Joe Biden, explained that “the difference in sentencing (in cases of) crack and cocaine is still responsible for unjustified ethnic disparities in convictions”.
Mr. Garland added that the Biden administration supported a proposed law to change the sentences. This text was presented to Congress in January 2021, but did not progress.