CRACK SENTENCING: AN ECONOMIST'S DREAM

I hope the guys who write the "Freakonomics" books are reading this blog.

Today the law of sentencing crack cocaine offenders changes and is adjusted retroactively. Oversimplified, the idea is to remove classicist and racial implications by allowing for the lack of purity in crack cocaine as opposed to powder. A street crack dealer may have caught four times as much as polite, suburban dealer of powder cocaine, even though the street guy may have about one fifth of the psychoactive material.

I'm not knocking the change in law. It was a decent correction and probably a worthwhile cost saving.

Still.....it would be an interesting exercise to see how many of these "unjustly" oversentenced, oppressed minorities go back to selling recreational street drugs of some kind. Stay tuned, those stats just cry out to be kept.

Instead of crunching the numbers we could be "cracking" them sometime soon.