The ACLU held a screening of American Violet at the U.S. Capitol Building on May 5, followed by a discussion on reforming the U.S. criminal justice system and the crack/cocaine disparity.
In the film, Dee Roberts (Nicole Beharie) was arrested and imprisoned for 21 months. Roberts had no prior drug history and no drugs on her possession at the time of her arrest. She was offered a plea bargain that would allow her to go home, yet would require her to plead guilty, becoming a convicted felon. Her other option was to go to prison, jeopardize the custody of her children, and face longer jail time.
With the help of the ACLU, Roberts elected to fight the system, which pinned her up against the county’s district attorney with a history of conducting racially motivated drug raids to increase convictions and secure federal funding for the county’s drug task force.
Ms. Kelly was present at the Congressional screening of the film.
“Where I get the strength through all of this, is [from] my faith in God, and [from] my four girls who I have to set an example for, to show them that we are not limited to the things that people try to dish out to us in life,” said Ms. Kelly.
“…racial targeting is happening nationwide,” said Graham Boyd, director of the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project.
“Federal money was funding a task force that was set up by the district attorney. That task force was set up explicitly to arrest black people. Now that’s not what they wrote in their charter, they said specifically to go after crack cases, but they understood full well in the county that was about half African-American, that was going to result in the overwhelming arrest and prosecution of African Americans,” said Mr. Boyd.
American Violet was directed by Tim Disney and written by Bill Haney, and stars Alfre Woodard, Nicole Beharie, Will Patton and Tim Blake Nelson. American Violet is currently in area theaters.
America’s Punitive Prison System
According to the Department of Justice, at the end of 2007, federal and state prisons and local jails held just under 2.3 million prisoners, by far the largest prison population of any country in the world.
“Americans are locked up for crimes—from writing bad checks to using drugs—that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations,” wrote Adam Liptak (“Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations,” NY Times, April 23, 2008).
The FBI’s 2007 Uniform Crime Report (UCR) estimated that there were 1.8 million state and local drug abuse violation arrests in the United States. According to the most recent National Corrections Reporting Program of new prison admissions from 2003, African Americans constituted 53.5 percent of all persons who entered prison for drug convictions.
The Drug Policy Alliance is a nonprofit organization which advocates for U.S. drug policies that “no longer arrest, incarcerate, disenfranchise and otherwise harm millions of nonviolent people.” The Alliance asserts:
“There is a self-perpetuating, cyclical quality to the treatment of Blacks and Latinos in the U.S. criminal justice system. Much of the discrimination visited upon these groups stems from the perceptions of criminal justice decision-makers that most crimes are committed by minorities, and most minorities commit crimes. Although empirically false, these perceptions cause a disproportionate share of law enforcement attention to be directed at minorities, which in turn leads to more arrests of blacks and Latinos.”
Since the Reagan administration launched the war on drugs in the 1980s, federal and state measures have emphasized law enforcement arrest and incarceration rather than prevention and treatment. The current $14.1 billion 2009 federal drug control budget has allocated two-thirds for interdiction, law enforcement and supply reduction, and one-third to prevention, treatment and demand reduction.
The current White House civil rights agenda includes drug policy initiatives and the need to eliminate the crack/powder cocaine disparity.
Public policy that disproportionately targets African Americans includes the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which established the crack/powder cocaine disparity, by which a person found with 5 grams of crack cocaine an amount equal to roughly 5 packets of artificial sweetener, is subject to minimum felony sentence of five years in prison without parole. However, for the distribution of 500 grams of powder cocaine, the offender receives the same five-year sentence. This disparity is known as the “100:1 ratio.”
The United States Sentencing Commission created by Congress to develop fair federal sentencing guidelines, has since concluded that crack cocaine is not appreciably much different from powder cocaine in its chemical composition and physical reactions of its users. The U.S. Sentencing Commission has urged Congress to reconsider the statutory penalties for crack cocaine.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that judges can use their discretion and sentence crack cocaine offenders for less time than required by the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (Kimbrough v. United States (2007)).
Additionally, there have been legislative proposals to reform the crack/powder cocaine disparity, including the Drug Sentencing Reform Act of 2007 (S. 1383) introduced by Senator Sessions (R-AL) and the Drug Sentencing Reform and Kingpin Trafficking Act of 2007 (S. 1711), introduced by then Senator Biden (D-DE). Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) has also reintroduced a legislative proposal in the House to eliminate the crack/cocaine disparity.
The international community has recognized the inequalities in the U.S. criminal justice system. In a recent UN report released on May 8, U.N. Special Rapporteur Doudou Dien urged the U.S. to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system and end the practice of sentencing juveniles to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He also called on Congress to pass the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA) and create a bipartisan commission to evaluate the on-going fight against racism and the occurrence of re-segregation, especially in housing and education.
Human Rights Watch recommends in its March 2009 Report, “Decades of Disparity,” that state, local and federal governments, restructure funding and resource allocation to prioritize substance abuse treatment and outreach; revise drug sentencing laws to increase the use of community based-sanctions for drug offenses; eliminate mandatory minimum sentences; and conduct an analysis of racial disparities in all phases of drug law enforcement to ensure that drug laws do not disproportionately burden black communities.
“This Administration has pledged to renew the U.S. commitment to human rights at home and abroad. Now we must walk the walk and turn words into action by addressing the ongoing discrimination and injustice that exists here at home," said Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU Human Rights Program, in a press release.
