On the recordJuly 28, 2010
I want to thank the gentleman from Virginia for being a champion of this issue of eliminating the disparities that have so long plagued so many communities. I thank the chairman, John Conyers, for being persistent over the years on the criminal justice issues--even coming to Houston, Texas, and listening to a teeming room of individuals who came to tell him how they had been discriminated against by this overwhelming inequitable law dealing with crack cocaine. Thank you. Today we're doing something that is not going to be soft on crime. But let me see if you understand this. It takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the 5-year mandatory minimum. It just takes 5 grams of crack cocaine. Similarly it takes 5 kilograms of powder cocaine to trigger the 10-year mandatory minimum but 50 grams of crack cocaine. And so it is important that this 1-to-18 be put in place in response to the 1980s when we thought this devastating act of using drugs was the underpinnings of crime. But what we have seen and what the U.S. Sentencing Commission has seen is that we're creating crime by throwing these individuals in jail instead of rehabilitation and by keeping this oppressive sentencing structure. So for the first time, we're eliminating the 5-year mandatory minimum prison term for first-time possession of crack cocaine and it encourages the U.S. Sentencing Commission to amend the sentencing guidelines.
