The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, and was effective in 1965, was supposed to rectify the unequal treatment of black individuals. It just served to drive the discrimination underground. On the surface, blacks were admitted as members of society. They could eat at restaurants, go the theater, use the rest rooms, and ride the bus. But a law cannot change a person's belief, or society's covert behavior. As blacks pressed for significant changes in society, majority resistance, to considering and treating black individuals as equals, was strengthened and conservative ideology became more dominant (Carter 291).

Blacks are discriminated against by the larger majority for two main reasons: they are black, and they are often poor. The justice system discriminates against both groups. When a person is poor and black, it is two strikes against the person, not just one. If a person is rich and white, the justice system favors that person with preferential t

Given the likelihood these not actions will not be fulfilled, the solution lies in the criminal justice system treating all criminals equally. Enforcement, of the crack cocaine provisions, should be applied evenly across the population. The addition of race as a criteria, for stopping and detaining a person as a suspected drug courier, must be eliminated. Young black males must not be made to feel like they are the causes of all evil in society. The apparent attempt, by the majority to sentence as many black males as possible to jail, must be shown to be false. With society's image of the young black males, as a hoodlum, perpetrated by the court system and the media, racial discrimination will never be dissolved but will only become more deeply entrenched.

The public is slow to show sympathy for the poor, mostly minority, and often guilty defendants who are served by the public defenders office (Gleick 42). The public defenders office is often perceived as the enemy of the predominantly white majority's public welfare. Eighty to ninety percent of all felony defendants are too poor to hire their own lawyers. Drug charges are felony charges. The majority of crack users are white (Carter 292). Over Eighty-eight percent of all federal crack distribution convictions are black individuals; this compares to blacks comprising under twenty-five percent of cocaine trafficking convictions (Smolowe 44). The difference in ratio lies in the definitions of the crimes and in the choices of the prosecutors office of who to prosecute. It was the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act which set the different penalties for crack and powder cocaine (Kennedy 20).

The political implications, of voting to lower the mandatory sentence for conviction of a crack cocaine offense, played into the inability of the Sentencing Commission to have its recommendation followed to equalize the sentences. Th