Get out of Jail Free Card

Well, the prisoners will not be immediately released from prison but the prison sentence of crack cocaine offenders will decrease from ten years and a month to eight years and ten months. This is a a year and three months decrease in prison time. With the jails of the United States overpopulated they hope to see a decrease in the prison population by 3800 in the next fifteen years. Now the courts are trying to determine whether or not this new decreassed prison sentence should be applied to 19,500 crack cocaine offenders who are current prisoners and had commited the crime previously to this new regulation.

These rules have been changed because people thought it was strange that possessing 5ooo grams of powder cocaine has a ten year sentence like the possession of 50 grams of crack cocaine. Also about eighty percent of the convicted for possession of crack cocaine are black which civil rights people were fighting. The Supreme Court felt that the sentencing for this crime was too high, but by reducing the sentence Congress felt underminded since they had rejected the movement to decrease the sentence in 1995.

The original guideline in 1987 had changed a lower sentence to ten years and one month and has not been changed since until now.