New policy brief on EQUAL Act assembles notable data on crack and powder cocaine sentencing

This press release, headlined “Princeton Policy Advocacy Clinic Students Release Analysis of Federal Crack-Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparities, Draw Bipartisan Praise,” provides a partial summary of this great new policy brief.  Here is part of the press release:

[Detailed crack offense sentencing] data come from a nonpartisan policy brief written by undergraduate students as part of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs’ Policy Advocacy Clinic, analyzing the potential impacts of passage of the Eliminating a Quantifiably Unjust Application of the Law (EQUAL) Act.  First introduced in 2021 and then re-introduced in 2023, both times with strong bipartisan support, the EQUAL Act would eliminate the 18-to-1 federal sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenses and authorize the resentencing of people previously convicted of crack offenses.

In their policy brief, Emilie Chau ’25, Nate Howard ’25, and Jennifer Melo ’25 present a history of the sentencing disparity, aggregate data on federal convictions and incarceration for cocaine offenses, and analyze demographic information of those convicted.  They also share a projection by the U.S. Sentencing Commission that passage of the EQUAL Act would reduce the average sentence of newly convicted people by 31 months and cut the average sentence of nearly all of the 7,800 people eligible by more than 6 years.

I recommend the policy brief in full, as it presents lots of notable data on federal sentencing from Fiscal Year 2015 to 2023 quite effectively.  It also concludes with this notable point about state sentencing for cocaine offenses:

Forty-one states have no sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, and of the remaining nine, seven of them have a disparity that is lower than the 18-to-1 ratio at the federal level.  This means that only two states, Missouri and New Hampshire, have sentencing disparities that are higher than the federal level.  It is also striking that political partisanship does not appear to be determinative of cocaine sentencing policy.  The vast majority of red states, blue states and purple states have no sentencing disparity.