It wasn’t until 2010 that Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the disparity between rock and powder to 18 to 1. The racial disparities in mass incarceration were exacerbated even further by the passing of the 1994 Crime Bill, which imposed even tougher prison sentences for federal drug trafficking charges. “We are beginning to talk about the impact of racism on the trade that Franklin and his crew are involved in,” Mosley said of Season 5. Four years after the law took effect, the sentencing disparity skyrocketed as the average sentence for a Black person was 49% higher. “It really was responsible for this era of mass incarceration that we are in today and still feeling the effects of its massive fulcrum point in the last 40 years.”ĭata from the ACLU states that, before the federal mandatory minimum was established, the average drug sentence for Black people was 11% higher than for white people. “There should have been no difference between sentencing for powder cocaine or rock cocaine,” Andron said. Ultimately, medical experts determined that, from a pharmacological standpoint, the drug is equally harmful in powder and rock form.
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The law cracked down much heavier on low-income communities, specifically communities of color, because the price of crack cocaine was much lower than that of powder, which was more often distributed across affluent, white areas, according to the ACLU.
Where all of a sudden if you have some cocaine, you get one year, if you have some crack, you do eight,” executive producer Walter Mosley said. “We are definitely dealing with how all of a sudden the official crackdown, no pun intended, on crack, is with Black people. The law was heavily criticized because, while it attempted to strengthen federal efforts against controlled substances, it deepened the racial inequities in federal drug sentencing by establishing a sentencing disparity between the distribution of powder and crack cocaine of 100 to 1. You might even go so far as to say used this as an excuse to lock up a generation of Black people.”įollowing Bias’ death, lawmakers passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which was known colloquially as the “Len Bias Law” and created a mandatory minimum sentencing for cocaine distribution. Even though his death was not rock-related, ultimately it led to Congress passing this really Draconian sentencing law… All of a sudden was on the radar of people it hadn’t been before, and yet the government completely bungled the response. “It became the reason why all of a sudden everybody was up in arms. “Len Bias’ death started this kind of firestorm,” Andron said in a recent Television Critics’ Association panel, discussing how Season 5’s premier, which airs Wednesday night, spotlights the former University of Maryland star’s death. Len Bias was two days removed from being drafted as the second overall pick by the NBA’s Boston Celtics when he died of cardiac arrhythmia induced by a cocaine overdose.
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