Legislation meant to address sentencing disparities for crack and powder cocaine offenses has helped reduce the number of cases involving female offenders

During the “War on Drugs” in the 1980s, the US Congress infamously passed anti-drug legislation that triggered mandatory minimum sentences for offenses involving much smaller amounts of crack cocaine than for powder cocaine. The former substance was associated with minority offenders, whereas the latter was associated with white offenders. Since that time, legal decisions have granted judges more leeway in sentencing, and the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act (FSA) was passed to address the unequal sentencing guidelines for cocaine offenses. In an article published online first in the May 2022 issue of Feminist Criminology, Makeela J. Wells describes this legal history as context for her study. She is one of few researchers exploring the effects of the FSA on sentencing outcomes for females convicted of federal cocaine offenses. In her article, Wells analyzed annual data from the Monitoring of Federal Criminal Sentences Series, prepared by the United States Sentencing Commission and available from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD). She compared cases from five years prior to the passage of the FSA, to cases from five years after that. She tested the influence of race, ethnicity, and drug-related factors on pre-sentence detention, “downward departures” (which allow judges to sentence below federal guideline ranges), and sentence length before and after the FSA. Wells found that “the total number of federal crack and powder cocaine cases involving females decreased after passage of [the] FSA,” with crack cocaine cases decreasing by nearly 50 percent, “from 2,210 cases in the pre-FSA period to 1,126 in the post-FSA period,” which she attributes to both pre-FSA Supreme Court decisions giving judges sentencing leeway, and the passage of the FSA. More publications making use of Monitoring of Federal Criminal Sentences data can be found here.