“Criminal courts are not designed to achieve justice. Nor are they designed to keep us safe. The aberrations of justice….are not isolated incidents. They routinely occur in every jurisdiction and every courtroom in America. The primary if not exclusive purpose of criminal courts is to process and ship people, especially black and brown people to the new plantation otherwise known as prison.” Leo Barron Hicks, The New Cotton

“Gov. Jerry Brown signed the California Fair Sentencing Act on Sunday; the bill alters the state’s laws such that identical weights of “cocaine” and “cocaine base” (the legal term that often refers to crack) are treated the same. Previously, for example, individuals convicted of possessing at least 14.25 grams of cocaine base were subject to the same property forfeiture laws as those who possessed 28.5 grams of cocaine, while the law now applies only to those convicted of possessing at least 28.5 grams of either substance.

President Obama signed a similar revision to federal law in 2010, though that bill merely reduced and did not eliminate the cocaine/crack disparity.

The subtext of these reforms, of course, is that while white Americans are much more likely to have used cocaine than black Americans, black Americans are much more often imprisoned for cocaine-related crimes—in part because blacks seem to use crack more often than whites and crack is more heavily criminalized than powder cocaine.” (Slate)