Tuesday

CT Governor Vetoes Racial Justice Bill

Gov. M. Jodi Rell has vetoed what its supporters had called the Racial Justice Bill. This important piece of legislation would have addressed the extreme racial disparity in Connecticut's prisons by equalizing the penalties for crack and powder cocaine.

This powerful Op-Ed
by Charles Rangel, rightly takes the governor to task.

2 comments:

Tom McKenna said...

All I see in his whiny comments are gratuitous assertions about police avoiding arresting dealers (why would they do that?) and "targeting" blacks in cities. Excuse me, but when crack-fueled violent crime is prevalent in black communities, that's where enforcement will go.

The answer is not removing the disparity (which simply recognizes the higher potency and addictiveness of crack and its relation to violent crime), it's by arresting users wherever they're found, whether in suburbs or in inner cities, whether black or white. A rainbow coalition of criminals, in other words!

Anonymous said...

“I, too, don't believe in drugs. For years I paid my people extra to stay away from that sort of stuff, but someone comes along saying, I've got powders where if you put up a three to four thousand dollar investment, you can make fifty thousand distributing, then there is no way to resist it. I want to keep it respectable. I DON'T WANT IT NEAR SCHOOLS, I DON'T WANT IT SOLD TO CHILDREN! In my city, we'd keep the traffic in the Dark People…...” - The character Kansas City Don in a discussion regarding opposition to drug dealing in a scene from the 1972 film "The Godfather"