Fair Sentencing Act Pros And Cons

INTRODUCTION The Fair Sentencing Act (FSA) of 2010 (Public Law 111-220) was an act by Congress, and became law on August 3, 2010 ( ). The FSA intent is to reduce the gap between the amount of crack cocaine and powder cocaine needed to initiate federal criminal penalties from a 100:1 weight ratio to an 18:1 weight ratio. The FSA also eliminates the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for the possession of crack cocaine (Reid 2012). The FSA replaced the controversial Anti-Drug Abuse Act (ADAA) of 1986, that was seen as a racially bias, expensive, and unfair legislation from the Reagan Administration's “War on Drugs” from the mid 1980s (). The ADAA had become an outdated law that revealed the popular consensus of congress at the time, that crack cocaine was a more dangerous drug than powder cocaine. In the years that followed, the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC), along with other agencies, conducted extensive research and concluded that there was no difference in the effects of the two drug forms, hence the sentencing disparity was unfair and not warranted (Gabbidon,Taylor 2005).
Legislation in response to reduce the racial disparity began in the mid-1990s, and culminated in the signing of the FSA. The FSA has been described as improving the fairness of the federal criminal justice system by prominent politicians such as, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. However, Some members of Congress are opposed to the Act. Lamar S. Smith (R-TX), the top-ranking Republican on the United States House Committee on the Judiciary, has criticized the act and argued against its passage (Bungarner
According to some experts it's a long way to go, and it needs to be reformed before it's considered just. One area this is apparent is in drug courts, which have proven to help place low-level offenders into drug treatment programs avoiding federal prison incarceration (Schuster 2010). Many of them treatment facilities have a strict criteria for admission. Many of the cases are ones that a prison term would most likely would not be imposed, with or without the program. School-zone drug laws, imposed with the enthusiastic goal of stopping drug sales to children. Unfortunately its unintended criminal convictions most often arrested for sales between consenting adults (Gertsman