re: #1186 Gus 802

Case in point. Throwing someone in an 8’ X 10’ cell for 35 years for possessing 4 ounces of pot. Seems like a rather evil and sadistic punishment.

Absolutely. And don’t get me started on the huge disparity in sentencing b/t crack and cocaine. 100-1 disparity until earlier this week. Now it’s only 20-1, and so it’s only 20x the racial bias.

Durbin’s Bid to End Sentencing Disparity

More than 80 percent of those arrested for crack have been black (despite the fact that most crack users are white), further exacerbating the racial disparities of a criminal-justice system author Michelle Alexander compares to Jim Crow segregation in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. More than 20 years since the passage of the law, the arbitrarily draconian penalties for crack cocaine have contributed to the increasing racial disparities in the U.S. prison system and helped swell the number of those behind bars to fully more than 1 percent of the entire U.S. population.

(IIRC the 20-1 compromise is what they went with)