“Crack and powder cocaine are two forms of the same drug and continuing to treat them differently disproportionately hurts black Americans”, a background document provided by Clinton’s campaign stated.
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Hillary Clinton will unveil plans aimed at ending racial profiling and reducing sentences for those caught using crack cocaine when she swings through Atlanta, Georgia Friday.
Under the Fair Sentencing Act, passed in 2010, the amounts of crack cocaine and powder cocaine that trigger the same mandatory minimum sentences are very different. And she will call for a federal, state and local ban on racial profiling as a method of law enforcement, which she will argue is an ineffective tactic, as well as demeaning to the people who are interrogated.
Clinton is set to visit Memphis and Nashville on November 20 in what will be her first visit to Tennessee of this presidential campaign.
The measures announced on Friday will include changing the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine, according to the campaign official, but more of her criminal justice platform will be released soon. Clinton’s plan would sentence cocaine and crack offenders equally.
“In this campaign, Hillary Clinton has said we must recognize a few hard truths about race and justice in America in order to reform our criminal justice system”, the campaign aide said.
Clinton laid out her broad agenda for criminal justice reform in one of the first major speeches of her campaign, in April at Columbia University in New York, where she promised to “end the era of mass incarceration”. That is seen as discriminatory against African Americans, who are more likely to use crack and therefore receive longer jail times, while whites, who are more often cocaine users, receive lighter sentences.
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The policy proposals come as 2016 candidates continue to grapple how to handle the growing national momentum for criminal justice reform and how to interact with the Black Lives Matter movement, a protest movement spawned in response to the deaths of unarmed black men and women including Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Sandra Bland. Bernie Sanders, have taken cues from the Black Lives Matter movement over the past few months, holding private meetings with activists and promising to roll out policy proposals to address the activists’ concerns.
