War on the War on Drugs

[Content Note: Racism.]

So, this is good news:

The Obama administration is beginning an aggressive new effort to foster equity in criminal sentencing by considering clemency requests from as many as thousands of federal inmates serving time for drug offenses, officials said Monday.

The initiative, which amounts to an unprecedented campaign to free non­violent offenders, will begin immediately and continue over the next two years, officials said. The Justice Department said it expects to reassign dozens of lawyers to its understaffed pardons office to handle the requests from inmates.

"The White House has indicated it wants to consider additional clemency applications, to restore a degree of justice, fairness and proportionality for deserving individuals who do not pose a threat to public safety," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Monday. "The Justice Department is committed to recommending as many qualified applicants as possible for reduced sentences."

This follows the decision of the US Sentencing Commission, an independent agency that sets sentencing policies for federal judges, to vote "to revise its guidelines to reduce sentences for defendants in most of the nation's drug cases." In 2002, the commission "found that the [sentencing] disparity had created a racial imbalance in which harsh sentences had been disproportionately imposed on minorities, particularly African Americans."

Ostensibly, this new effort should help address that disparity. But:

Holder has announced a series of initiatives to tackle disparities in criminal penalties, beginning in August when he said low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no connection to gangs or large-scale drug organizations would not be charged with offenses that call for strict mandatory sentences. He has traveled across the country to highlight community programs in which nonviolent offenders have received substance-abuse treatment and other assistance instead of long prison sentences.

Emphasis mine.

My concern here is that men of color, specifically black and Latino men, are disproportionately likely to be accused of having gang or cartel affiliations during drug prosecutions, sometimes even if they have no meaningful connections to gangs or drug cartels at all. Gang activity by association is another level of bias, which will mean many of these offenders, including women of color whose "gang activity" might have been established simply by dating someone in a gang, won't benefit from clemency.

This article about the new effort [CN: sexual abuse] tells the story of a white woman who is serving a disproportionately long sentence "for her minor role helping her drug dealer husband." But if her husband had been involved with a gang, or could have been convincingly accused of involvement with a gang, hers might not be described as "emblematic of the harsh and inflexible sentencing regimes of the past," nor she a good candidate for clemency.

So, I am glad for this effort, but I am concerned about its application. Its parameters may simply entrench racial privilege in yet another way.