A once-promising bipartisan bill to erase the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine failed to make it into a year-end omnibus spending bill winding through Congress, likely dooming efforts to pass crack cocaine sentencing reform for yet another legislative session.
Criminal justice advocates have been working for decades to roll back draconian crack cocaine laws passed by Congress in the 1980s. Those laws set the penalties for crack cocaine offenses at 100 times greater than equivalent powder cocaine offenses, which resulted in monstrously long and racially disparate sentences. In 2010 Congress passed a law reducing the sentencing ratio to 18–1, and advocates hoped to finally erase it once and for all this legislative session with the passage of the EQUAL Act.
