The Arbitrary & Racialized Calculus of U.S. Crack Laws

• In Event: Racialization of Offenders and Victims

Abstract

Drug policies in the U.S. have created dissonance amongst the branches of government, and have had detrimental implications for black communities, and for the criminal justice system. The drug policies which have heavily assisted in the culmination of the U.S. phenomenon of mass incarceration, in which nearly half of all inmates in jails and prisons are black, have engendered discriminatory policing which enforces the catalyzing problem: policies formulated because of fear of non-whites. The havoc which was wrought by these policies is quite quantifiable, and in accordance with that notion, it is numbers which have helped create the disparities in our system. An only recently diminished 100:1 crack/cocaine policy from 1986, and a current non-retroactive 18:1 crack/cocaine policy, have come from a Congress which has not, for decades, made the rational choice despite knowledge of ever-expanding racial disparities. This paper argues that crack laws are racialized and arbitrary, and on a macro-scale were created to control the black population in the age of "colorblindness."

Author

• Aaron Lang, Eastern Kentucky University