Latest / Neon Rifts Inside Urban Legal Turmoil
How Crack Cocaine Transformed Urban Prosecution Tactics
The crack epidemic of the 1980s arrived in American cities with such velocity that prosecutors had no established legal framework for handling the scale of distribution and addiction. This episode examines how urban district attorneys adapted their strategies in real time, creating mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines that would define criminal justice for thirty years. We reconstruct specific prosecutions from Miami, New York, and Detroit, analyzing how the sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine—rooted partly in prosecutorial discretion—became enshrined in federal law…
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