Congressman Danny Davis, D-Ill., indicated his support for the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s decision to apply new sentencing guidelines that went into effect on Nov. 1 retroactively to as many as 19,500 drug offenders, 86 percent of whom are Black, according to a press release. Davis noted that African Americans suffered disparate sentences because, under the guidelines, it took one hundred times more powder cocaine than crack cocaine to receive the same sentence.
Davis noted, ‘the United States imprisons more of its citizens that any other developed nation in the world. One of the reasons was the unfair and racially biased sentencing guidelines. This, along with the two 7-2 landmark Supreme Court decisions on sentencing announced this week, are a significant step toward justice but we still have many more steps before us.’