What Did More Damage, the Crack or the Laws?
By Ernest Boykin
My entire life was ahead of me. I was a nineteen-year-old student at Howard University, studying communications, when I was convicted and sentenced to 42 months in prison for selling a $20 bag of crack. My dreams of becoming a film-producer were disrupted because of a bad decision, and instantly my once-promising life had been derailed. Instead of earning my bachelor’s degree in my early twenties, I was inserted into the system which I’m still fighting to get out of twenty-plus years later.
If I had been busted for the same amount of powder cocaine, I probably wouldn’t have been arrested. A $20 bag of crack is about the equivalent of 1/20th of a gram. Visually, a gram of cocaine is about the size of the contents of a small table sugar or Splenda package. If I had been prosecuted for 1/20th of a gram of cocaine, I probably would have never seen the inside of a prison. Most likely my punishment as a college student would have been some sort of “slap on the wrist.” A plea agreement may have even dropped the charge down to a misdemeanor.
$20 worth of crack is a little smaller in size than a Skittles piece of candy. When I was a teen, judges were giving out sentences for crack like they were candy. So many black and brown kids from my neighborhood in Washington, D.C., were being injected into the system when I was getting ready to graduate from high school in 1997. It was almost normal in D.C. to get locked up for crack.
Some people have said that was a direct result of the 1994 omnibus anti-crime law and is an example of how it ravaged black communities. Young people were getting sentenced to three years, five years, and in many cases ten years, five days a week, in the shadow of our Nation’s Capitol Building. But if you look at the amounts of crack they were being caught with compared with the same amount of powder cocaine, it makes me wonder which was worse. Was the crack doing more damage in my community? Or were the laws which made crack sentences one hundred times heavier than the powder sentences really doing the damage?
In the 42 months I was in prison, my favorite aunt passed away from a heart attack, and so many other things happened in my absence from society and my family. I still can’t forgive myself for missing Aunt Kathy’s funeral. Instead of being around people who were striving to have a career in college, I was being housed and mentored by people who society called criminals. Some of the men were good and some of them were bad.
During the time serving my sentence, some of my high school friends went on to graduate from college, some started careers, and others went on to start young families. Forty-two months taught me a valuable lesson about time moving on without me. As my sentence was winding down to an end, I started to notice the cycle of young people my age consistently coming into the prison. For every one of us who went home, three more would come in on the next busload. These new freshmen coming in the prison system behind me were usually black males and their sentences were all stiff as a result of the 1986 crack laws which created the crack-powder disparity.
At nineteen, I wasn’t a stone-cold criminal. I was an impressionable, impatient, and naïve young person who was just trying to figure out life. The desire for success was embedded in me, and I just wanted to get to a level of financial independence as fast as possible so I wouldn’t burden my family. I could have turned my life around and finished my education with some guidance and resources, had I not been pushed into the system.
The lesson the system taught me was that if you were black and got caught with crack, you would be thrown away like trash. Judged by unequal justice and hidden away in the prison system for lengthy periods with no intentions to help you rehabilitate. But if you got caught with cocaine, you needed help and deserved a lighter sentence in order to learn your lesson.
The ratio of 18 to 1 is better than 100 to 1, but it is still not good enough — especially when it has been confirmed by science that crack is the same drug as cocaine. Black and brown communities have crack problems, whereas cocaine has been known as the drug of the rich. Are the laws saying rich people deserve less time than black and brown people? I hope not, but that’s how it appears.
~Ernest Boykin, III
