1 = 100? It is according to the Drug Quantity Table, where 1 gram of crack cocaine equals 100 grams of powder cocaine; part of the drug equivalency formulae born out of the 80s overblown media hype and of mandatory minimum sentencing law passed by the Congress in 1986. Although prison sentence for trafficking/possession of 10 gram of crack cocaine is not 100 times that for 1 Kilo of powder cocaine, it can still lead to a jail sentence that is nearly 10 times longer. However, that is not the only problem with the sentence that is partly determined by the Sentencing Guidelines and a so called Base Offense Level (BOL) table. It so happens that trafficking in small amount of cocaine occurs mainly in inner-city neighborhoods and by relatively young African-Americans. And yes, they form the bulk (85%) of prison population that is serving very long jail sentences.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC), an independent body within Justice dept that is charged with developing prison sentencing guidelines, is trying to address the disparity between the longer jail sentences for crack cocaine offense and those for other illegal drugs such as powder cocaine. The USSC decided to decrease crack cocaine related BOL by two. For eg., a formerly level 16 BOL (with a mandatory prison term of 2 years) is now 14 and thus could lead to zero jail-time. This has been widely commented and welcomed by Federal Public and Community Defenders, NAACP, ACLU and other civic groups.

However, that is not what has riled up the Administration’s Justice Dept., it is the USSC’s proposal to make the changes in BOL retroactive. They object vehemently to many findings from the USCC’s report titled Analysis of the Impact of the Crack Cocaine Amendment If Made Retroactive, especially they argue that it would lead to overburdening of the district courts with the petitions from thousands of inmates who are eligible to reduction in prison sentence and other issues such as overcrowding of half-way houses, increase of workload for the U.S. Martials, and release of violent criminals into localities that could suffer from renewed drug trade and violence associated with that, especially in the light of the FBI statistics showing increasing rates of violent crimes over the last three years.

It is not clear when the USSC is likely to vote on the issue of retroactive reduction of crack cocaine sentences, whenever that happens, it would lead to release of large number of inmates. Therefore we at FortiusOne thought that the public may want to discover the geographic dimension of the possible early release of the crack cocaine inmates…Below is a heat map of crack prisoners who are eligible for release after one year. Explore on GeoCommons data for other time periods along with number of defendants by the type drug offenses and the average/median prison sentences by federal district courts for drug crimes.

Crack offenders eligible for early release within a year

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