Decades ago, drug-fueled violence was ravaging many neighborhoods so much that some pastors and other community leaders described it as “a new form of genocide.” They demanded that Congress and the Reagan administration take action and the response was the bipartisan 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. The new law blamed the crime wave on cocaine and stipulated a fiveyear mandatory minimum prison sentence for possessing 500 grams of the powdered version or five grams of crack, later labeled the “100-1” rule. But powdered cocaine was widely used by European Americans. African Americans mostly used crack and the law ushered in the age of mass incarceration.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission, the independent agency of the judiciary responsible for helping to shape sentencing guidelines for federal courts, found that 88.3 percent of those convicted of federal crack offenses in 1993 were African Americans, though they comprised only 13 percent of the population.

The commission, in a 1995 report to Congress, blamed uneven enforcement of the law, adding, “The 100-to-1  crack cocaine to powder cocaine quantity ratio is a primary cause of the growing disparity between sentences for Black and White federal defendants.”

In fact, the rate of imprisonment for African Americans more than doubled from about 600 per 100,000 in 1970 to 1,808 in 2000, The Associated Press (AP) reported. For Latino Americans, it rose from 208 to 615 and, for European Americans, from 103 to 242.

Further, in 1994, Congress passed an omnibus crime bill which President William J. Clinton embraced and which ordered life sentences for three-time violent offenders, a kind of “three-strikesand-you’re-out” law, worsening the rate of imprisonment.

But harsh penalties for certain crimes were already embedded into the criminal justice system, especially after President Richard M. Nixon declared war on drugs on June 17, 1971, as he sought re-election. It was also a campaign plank of George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign. Presidents “leveraged drug-war policies in the following decades to their own political advantage, cementing the drug war’s legacy,” the AP reported in 2021. “The explosion of the U.S. incarceration rate, the expansion of public and private prison systems and the militarization of local police forces are all outgrowths of the drug war.”

States followed Congress’ lead and, decades after the 100-1 disparity was written into law, the “harsh federal and state penalties led to an increase in the prison industrial complex that saw millions of people, primarily of color, locked up and shut out of the American dream,” the AP reported. A review of federal and state incarceration data “shows that, between 1975 and 2019, the U.S. prison population jumped from 240,593 to 1.43 million Americans. Among them, about one in five people imprisoned had a drug offense listed as their most serious crime.”

The overall prison population is now more than two million – the highest in the world – confined in 1,719 state prisons, 109 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 80 Indian Country jails, as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories,” The Guardian reported. It an industry with “racist roots in American chattel slavery,” Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has said.

This warehousing of African Americans has indeed proven to be a boon to the prison industrial complex, including a major expansion of privately owned prisons. Also, prisons opened an economic lifeline for rural communities, where some 70 percent are located, Michelle Alexander, who wrote the seminal book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” told The New Yorker’s David Remnick.

And then there is the question of whether in focusing on drug-related violence as a domestic imperative the authorities were conveniently ignoring the real threat to national security: European American extremists and ethnic supremacists. Federal authorities did produce a report correctly identifying that source but withdrew it under Republican pressure. But, in March 2021, two months after extremists and supremacists led the assault on the U.S. Capitol, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a report that “echoes warnings made by U.S. officials, including the FBI director, Christopher Wray, who testified earlier this month that the threat from domestic violent extremism was ‘metastasizing’ across the country,” The Guardian reported.

All of that resulted from the “war on drugs,” which, besides facilitating massive imprisonment of African Americans, also entrenched into the criminal justice system a warped perspective of them. That most likely led to the trigger-happiness among some police officers. The U.S. Supreme Court worsened the situation by authorizing the police to use deadly force if, in their subjective judgment, they believe there is a deadly threat to themselves or others.

Some relief may finally be on the horizon. Attorney General Merrick Garland is moving to end the inherent discrimination in the 100-1 rule. He reminded federal prosecutors in a Dec. 16 memo that cocaine is cocaine, regardless of its form, and they should “advocate for a sentence consistent with powder cocaine rather than crack cocaine,” The Washington Post reported.

The driving force behind this enlightened approach is, in fact, the man who was most responsible for passage of the 100-1 and the three-strikes-and-you’reout laws: Joseph R. Biden. The then Delaware senator, speaking on the Senate floor on July 22, 1976, declared that Americans “are worried about being mugged on the subway. Women are worried about being raped on the way to their automobiles after work. . . . They worry that their government does not seem to be doing much about it and, unfortunately, they appear to be right.”

Biden has since disavowed the 100-1 law as a “profound mistake.” Campaigning in 2007 for the presidency, he introduced legislation in the Senate to remove the sentencing disparity and won support from Barack H. Obama, then an Illinois senator and presidential candidate. Later, Obama in the White House, with Biden his vice-president, signed a law that cut the 100-1 ratio to 18-1. The disparity was not completely erased but the number of federal crack convictions dropped in 2016 by 67 percent to 1,500 from six years earlier.

The policy change being put into force by Garland, whom Biden appointed, is probably part of this effort to right the wrong. But the journey towards justice in this instance is only starting and efforts are needed to make whole the victims of yet another example of blatant racism which has been al-