Crack-cocaine sentencing laws deliberately criminalized black drug behavior more than white

Evidence

Black people are arrested, convicted, and sent to prison more not because they are prone to criminal activity but because the law criminalizes black behavior more than it does the behavior of their white peers. In 2010 President Barack Obama signed into law a bipartisan bill to reduce the disparity from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1. The Fair Sentencing Act increased the amount of crack cocaine required for mandatory minimums for drug trafficking and eliminated the mandatory minimum sentence for first-time possession. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 421

Categorization

• DEFINE: The 100-to-1 vs 18-to-1 crack/powder disparity is the key quantifiable exhibit of the criminalization mechanism.
• XREF: connects to: Crack cocaine sentencing disparity is racially discriminatory in practice — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1231; Drug-war arrests and imprisonment fell disproportionately on Black Americans — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 1435