Sterling, then legal counsel to the House of Representative’s Subcommittee on Crime, who helped write the 1986 bill.įrom 1991 to 2001, nine times as many Black people as white people went to federal prison for crack offenses, the Network found. “The racial implications of the 1986 law were devastating,” said Eric E. To deter drug crime, Delaware discussed bringing back the whipping post and North Carolina officials wanted to revive the use of chain gangs. In 1988, Congress provided hundreds of millions more for police and prisons, and made crack the only drug for which simple possession was a federal crime.įifteen states followed suit and enacted more severe penalties for crack offenses, with quantity disparities between powder cocaine and crack ranging from 2-to-1 in California to 100-to-1 in Iowa and North Dakota. Policymakers responded with tough-on-crime laws, including the bipartisan Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which featured a 100-to-1 powder cocaine-to-crack disparity and dedicated three-quarters of $1.7 billion in federal funds to law enforcement and incarceration.
They couldn’t get the help they needed because everybody looked at them as ‘less than.’ The stigma was so wrong for African Americans. Crack users were painted as “dangerous degenerates” who were “scary and threatening” and needed to be locked up.įormer Major League baseball player Darryl Strawberry struggled publicly with drug addiction. Sensationalized stories of “crack babies” and violent “crackheads” routinely portrayed crack users as Black, even though most crack users were and still are white, the Network reports. A decade later, the same deeply rooted presumption of guilt and dangerousness on which Nixon capitalized fueled a heavily punitive approach to crack cocaine. President Richard Nixon initiated the “war on drugs” in 1971 in order to criminalize Black people. The racial gap in drug enforcement and sentencing is a byproduct of America’s punitive response to the crack crisis of the late ‘80s and the war on drugs it unleashed.
Reporters found that Black people are arrested far more frequently and punished more severely than white people for drug crimes, even though drug use within the two racial groups is roughly the same. In a yearlong investigation, the Asbury Park Press and the USA TODAY NETWORK examined hundreds of thousands of arrest records and federal drug convictions nationwide over the past 30 years. Heroin Project found that racial disparities rooted in the 1980s campaign against crack cocaine still persist today despite more compassionate rhetoric about the opioid crisis.
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