4 chapters across the catalog
The 1988 crack laws and the 1994 Crime Bill are identified as primary drivers of mass incarceration in the Black community. The hosts highlight Joe Biden's collaboration with segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond on these policies. They note the disparity between sentencing for crack versus powder cocaine as a systemic tool.
Joe Biden's 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act established a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. While Biden later claimed to have fought this disparity, he was a primary architect of the mandatory minimums that disproportionately targeted street-level offenders in black communities.
Joe Biden appeared with Al Sharpton at the National Action Network to apologize for past "mistakes" regarding sentencing disparities. Biden claimed he was misled by "experts" who suggested crack was fundamentally different from powder cocaine, a claim skeptics view as a revisionist political apology.
The 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine is criticized as a "scam" that devastated Black communities. Although President Barack Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, it only reduced the ratio to 18-to-1 rather than eliminating it. The hosts argue that many long-serving members of Congress were present when these laws were originally enacted and remain complicit in the resulting social damage.
