The differential treatment of crack cocaine and powder cocaine by America’s criminal “justice” system has been exposed as discriminatory and admitted to be unfair. Yet, the secret nightmare continues for thousands of African Americans still in prison for crack cocaine offenses, while people convicted of powder cocaine offenses – the majority of whom are white or Hispanic – have served far shorter sentences. Even as the US government has reformed the injustice of punitive sentencing for crack, it has doubled down on the injustice for those imprisoned before the reforms.

I’ll never forget the first time I had to explain federal crack cocaine laws to a client. I was 25 years old, fresh out of law school, and working as a public defender in Alabama. I had come to the local jail, where my client was being held in a 6ft x 8ft cell with three other men and no access to fresh air or to a single window.

My client thought he would be released from jail and home with his family after our first appearance in court. Instead, I told him, the tiny bag of crack cocaine that police had found in his car – less than half the size of a ping-pong ball – meant that he would likely spend the next five to 40 years in prison.

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