An Administrative Remedy for the Crack Mandatory Sentencing Problem

Current Federal laws over-punish minor crack dealers. A legislative fix for the problem has proven politically infeasible. Drug, form, and quantity, which form the basis of the existing sentencing schema, are relatively poor proxies of the dangerousness of the offender or the harm created by the conduct-pattern underlying the case. An administrative requirement that low-level crack prosecutions be approved centrally could ensure that the five-years-for-five-grams mandatory sentence is not over-used, while keeping that sentence available for the relatively rare cases (e.g., as part of crackdowns on gang violence) in which it is justified.