The Sentencing Project is a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy centre working for decarceration in the United States and seeking to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system. The organisation produces nonpartisan reports and research for use by state and federal policymakers, administrators, and journalists.
Leonard Kevin Bias was an American college basketball player for the Maryland Terrapins. In the last of his four years playing for Maryland, he was named a consensus first-team All-American. Two days after being selected by the Boston Celtics with the second overall pick in the 1986 NBA draft, Bias died from cardiac arrhythmia induced by a cocaine overdose. In 2021, Bias was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame.
The war on drugs is the policy of a global campaign, led by the United States federal government, of drug prohibition, military aid, and military intervention, with the aim of reducing the illegal drug trade in the United States. The initiative includes a set of drug policies that are intended to discourage the production, distribution, and consumption of psychoactive drugs that the participating governments, through United Nations treaties, have made illegal.
Mandatory sentencing requires that offenders serve a predefined term of imprisonment for certain crimes, commonly serious or violent offenses. Judges are bound by law; these sentences are produced through the legislature, not the judicial system. They are instituted to expedite the sentencing process and limit the possibility of irregularity of outcomes due to judicial discretion. Mandatory sentences are typically given to people who are convicted of certain serious and/or violent crimes, and require a prison sentence. Mandatory sentencing laws vary across nations; they are more prevalent in common law jurisdictions because civil law jurisdictions usually prescribe minimum and maximum sentences for every type of crime in explicit laws.
Willie Mays Aikens is an American former professional baseball first baseman who played in Major League Baseball for the California Angels, Kansas City Royals, and Toronto Blue Jays between 1977 and 1985. He had established himself as one of the top sluggers in the game before drugs derailed his career. In 1994, Aikens was sentenced to 20 years in prison on four counts of crack cocaine distribution and one count of use of a firearm during drug trafficking. He was released on June 4, 2008, after changes in federal drug laws, and is sometimes cited as an example of the results of mandatory maximum sentencing in drug-related crimes.
The crack epidemic was a surge of crack cocaine use in major cities across the United States throughout the entirety of the 1980s and the early 1990s. This resulted in a number of social consequences, such as increasing crime and violence in American inner city neighborhoods, a resulting backlash in the form of tough on crime policies, and a massive spike in incarceration rates.
Kemba Smith Pradia is an American prison reform activist.
The drug policy in the United States is the activity of the federal government relating to the regulation of drugs. Starting in the early 1900s, the United States government began enforcing drug policies. These policies criminalized drugs such as opium, morphine, heroin, and cocaine outside of medical use. The drug policies put into place are enforced by the Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Classification of Drugs are defined and enforced using the Controlled Substance Act, which lists different drugs into their respective substances based on its potential of abuse and potential for medical use. Four different categories of drugs are Alcohol, Cannabis, Opioids, and Stimulants.
Kimbrough v. United States, 552 U.S. 85 (2007), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court confirmed that federal district judges utilize, in an advisory fashion, Federal Sentencing Guidelines, in cases involving conduct related to possession, distribution, and manufacture of crack cocaine.
Crack cocaine, commonly known simply as crack, and also known as rock, is a free base form of the stimulant cocaine that can be smoked. Crack offers a short, intense high to smokers. The Manual of Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment calls it the most addictive form of cocaine.
Raymond Alvin Jackson is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Demico Boothe is an African-American bestselling author of several books on the plight of African-American men in the American prison system. Boothe's book Why Are So Many Black Men in Jail? addresses the issue of racism in the Crack versus Cocaine Laws and was published in 2007, three years before Michelle Alexander's better-known book that also addresses the subject, The New Jim Crow (2010). Why Are So Many Black Men in Prison? is on the Black Lives Matter recommended reading list.
Gretchen C. F. Shappert is an attorney. She has served as the United States Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina from 2004 to 2009 and the United States Attorney for the District of the Virgin Islands from 2018 to 2022.
The War on Drugs is a term for the actions taken and legislation enacted by the US federal government, intended to reduce or eliminate the production, distribution, and use of illicit drugs. The War on Drugs began during the Nixon administration with the goal of reducing the supply of and demand for illegal drugs, but an ulterior racial motivation has been proposed. The War on Drugs has led to controversial legislation and policies, including mandatory minimum penalties and stop-and-frisk searches, which have been suggested to be carried out disproportionately against minorities. The effects of the War on Drugs are contentious, with some suggesting that it has created racial disparities in arrests, prosecutions, imprisonment, and rehabilitation. Others have criticized the methodology and the conclusions of such studies. In addition to disparities in enforcement, some claim that the collateral effects of the War on Drugs have established forms of structural violence, especially for minority communities.
The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 was an Act of Congress that was signed into federal law by United States President Barack Obama on August 3, 2010, that reduces the disparity between the amount of crack cocaine and powder cocaine needed to trigger certain federal criminal penalties from a 100:1 weight ratio to an 18:1 weight ratio and eliminated the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of crack cocaine, among other provisions. Similar bills were introduced in several U.S. Congresses before its passage in 2010, and courts had also acted to reduce the sentencing disparity prior to the bill's passage.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a 2010 book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States, but Alexander noted that the discrimination faced by African-American males is prevalent among other minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged populations. Alexander's central premise, from which the book derives its title, is that "mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow".
The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 is a major law of the War on Drugs passed by the U.S. Congress which did several significant things:
- Created the policy goal of a drug-free America;
- Established the Office of National Drug Control Policy; and
- Restored the use of the death penalty by the federal government.
In the United States, women represent roughly a quarter of all arrests. Women and men are both more likely to be arrested for less serious property crimes, but men are more likely than women to be involved in violent crime. Since 1960, while arrests in total have decreased, women have become a higher percentage of those arrests, partly due to an increase in drug-related arrests. Steffensmeier and Schwartz (2008) claim that this increase is not because more women are committing substance-abuse offenses, but because law enforcement officials have begun using broader, more expansive definitions of crimes, arresting more people for minor crimes. Because women are more likely to commit these minor crimes, females have been disproportionately added to the number of arrests.
The cannabis policy of the Reagan administration involved affirmation of the War on Drugs, government funded anti-cannabis media campaigns, expanded funding for law enforcement, involvement of the U.S. military in interdiction and eradication, reduction in emphasis in drug treatment, and creation of new Federal powers to test employees and seize cannabis-related assets.
Terry v. United States, 593 U.S. ___ (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with retroactive changes to prison sentences for drug-possession crimes related to the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, its retroactive nature established by the First Step Act of 2018. In a unanimous judgement, the Court ruled that while the First Step Act does allow for retroactive considerations of sentence reductions for drug-possession crimes prior to 2010, this only covers those that were sentenced under minimum sentencing requirements.
