Drug Terms Reduced, Freeing Prisoners

There are some big meals on the way for Darryl Flood.

Mr. Flood, who has served 10 years in prison over crimes involving crack cocaine, had been scheduled for release in 2013. Under new sentencing rules that came into effect on Tuesday, however, he is one of more than 1,800 prisoners eligible for release right away.

Mr. Flood, like tens of thousands of other prisoners, had received a far tougher sentence for a crime involving crack cocaine than he would have if the drug had been in powdered form — a disparity commonly referred to as 100 times greater for crack than for powder

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Mr. Flood’s sister, Susan Cardwell, said in an interview that Mr. Flood was scheduled for release from prison in Ashland, Ky. on Tuesday night, and would board an overnight bus to rejoin the family in Virginia. “He told me he wanted me to send him $30 for the bus ride so he could eat on the way home — anything he wanted,” she said. “After jail food for so long,” she added, she expected their first stop would be an all-you-can-eat buffet.

At the time the law was passed in the 1980s, cocaine use and crime associated with it were skyrocketing.

Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project in Washington, said that the much of the spike had to do with initial turf wars as the drug hit the streets. Thousands of nonviolent criminals ended up with sentences that have long been criticized as extreme, and the disparity was increasingly viewed as racially tinged.

Congress addressed the issue by passing the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the sentencing disparity to 18 to 1. In June, the United States Sentencing Commission voted to apply the guidelines retroactively, with the new policy going into effect on Monday this week.

Over time, some 12,000 inmates could have their sentences, which average 13 years, shortened by an average of three years. Mr. Mauer noted that this still left “substantial” penalties for the crimes. “We’re not talking about a slap on the wrist here,” he said.

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