WASHINGTON — In a proposal that could allow as many as 5,500 federal inmates to apply for reduced prison terms, the Obama administration on Wednesday backed retroactively lightening some sentences for past crack cocaine convictions.
Testifying before the United States Sentencing Commission, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. cited the Fair Sentencing Act, a 2010 law that increased the volume of crack cocaine necessary to result in a mandatory minimum prison term.
The panel, which advises federal judges on how much prison time they should hand down for particular offenses, revised its crack cocaine sentencing guidelines last fall in response to the 2010 law. Mr. Holder said that it should make those changes retroactive for certain offenders, allowing them to seek a reduction in their prison terms.
“Because of the Fair Sentencing Act, our nation is now closer to fulfilling its fundamental, and founding, promise of equal treatment under law,” Mr. Holder said. “But I am here today because I believe — and the administration’s viewpoint is — that we have more to do.”
At the same time, citing public safety concerns, Mr. Holder urged the commission to make an exception for inmates who had significant criminal histories or who had possessed or used a gun at the time of their drug offense. Because such inmates could be more dangerous, he argued, they should not be eligible to seek reduced sentences.
The administration’s position prompted some political criticism. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, issued a statement on Wednesday accusing the administration of “supporting the release of dangerous drug dealers,” saying the proposal “shows that they are more concerned with well-being of criminals than with the safety of our communities.”
But Julie Stewart, the president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group that advocates for judicial discretion in sentencing decisions, contended that the commission should make its crack cocaine guidelines retroactive without any exceptions because criminal histories and any gun possession were already factored into sentences under a separate part of the guidelines.
“I think it’s political,” Ms. Stewart said of the Obama administration’s stance. Interviewed by phone, she characterized the Justice Department’s position as “splitting the baby.”
Congress established the sentencing commission in an effort to make federal prison sentences more uniform. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that its guidelines could not be binding, but many judges still follow them.
Several sitting federal judges are members of the commission, which is expected to decide by November whether to make the new guidelines retroactive.
The commission recently released a study showing that about 12,040 federal inmates would be eligible to apply to a judge for a reduction, without the carve-out suggested by Mr. Holder. The study said the inmates would potentially be eligible to have their sentences cut by an average of 37 months.
The study showed that about 513 of those inmates were convicted in one of the four federal districts in the State of New York. The vast majority of the overall group consists of black men, and their average age is 36, the study said.
The commission has also released a study of what happened to inmates who won early release after 2007, when it made retroactive a related set of changes to its crack cocaine guidelines. The study found no statistically significant disparity in the recidivism rate of that group when compared with a control group.
The panel’s deliberations are the latest chapter in a long-running, racially charged debate over severe mandatory minimum penalties for crack cocaine offenses enacted by Congress during the crack epidemic in the 1980s, amid a crime wave fueled by addicts and rival drug traffickers.
Under those laws, a drug dealer selling crack cocaine was subject to the same sentence as one selling 100 times as much powder cocaine. Crack cocaine was disproportionately prevalent in impoverished black communities, while powder cocaine was disproportionately favored by more affluent white users.
Mr. Holder had long argued that the crack-powder sentencing disparity was an injustice, and lobbied Congress earlier in his tenure as attorney general to enact the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the disparity to 18-to-1 by raising the volumes of crack that result in mandatory minimum sentence levels.
But Congress did not make the mandatory minimum changes retroactive. As a result, the commission is considering a proposal that would allow judges to remove prison time in excess of the old statutory minimum sentences, but such inmates would still not be eligible for a reduction to the new minimum sentences established by the 2010 law.
For example, under the old law, a person convicted of selling 75 grams of crack cocaine faced a sentence of 10 years to life in prison, while today he would instead face 5 to 20 years in prison. If the guidelines become retroactive, such an offender who had been sentenced to 12 years in prison several years ago could ask a judge to reduce his sentence to 10 years, the old statutory minimum term.