WASHINGTON — Under pressure from federal judges, inmate advocacy groups and civil rights organizations, federal authorities are considering a sweeping cut in prison sentences that could bring early release for thousands of federal inmates.
The proposal being weighed by the U.S. Sentencing Commission would shave an average of at least two years off the sentences of 19,500 federal prisoners, about 1 in 10 in the 200,000-inmate system. More than 2,500 of them, mainly those who have already served lengthy sentences, would be eligible for release within a year if the rule is adopted.
Such a mass commutation would be unprecedented: No other single rule in the two-decade history of the Sentencing Commission has affected nearly as many inmates. And no single law or act of presidential clemency, such as grants of amnesty to draft resisters and conscientious objectors after World War II and the Vietnam War, has affected so many people at one time.
The far-reaching move is aimed at addressing what is seen as an unfair disparity in federal cocaine laws dating to the mid-1980s that have imposed much harsher punishment on crack cocaine users and dealers than in powder cocaine cases. About 80% of those sentenced on federal crack charges every year are African American.
The Justice Department is warning of dire consequences if the proposal goes through, including the possibility that returning thousands of serious drug offenders to the streets would compound a recent increase in violent crime across the country.
"The unexpected release of 20,000 prisoners . . . would jeopardize community safety and threaten to unravel the success we have achieved in removing violent crack offenders from high-crime neighborhoods," the department said in a letter to the commission this month.
The congressionally chartered commission, which sets sentencing guidelines for federal judges, has already adopted reduced penalties for new crack cases hitting the courts effective Nov. 1. That decision will affect about 4,000 a cases a year. The debate now is about its plans to make those changes retroactive to inmates. The seven-member commission is considering the proposal at a hearing Tuesday; a vote is expected next year.
Congress started enacting tougher penalties for crack offenders in the 1980s, at the height of public fears about spreading street violence associated with the drug, and amid concern that crack was more dangerous and addictive than powder cocaine.
