Cory Booker: It's time for the next step in criminal justice reform (WP Opinion piece by Booker)

Edward Douglas woke up on Jan. 10, 2019, in a federal penitentiary in Pekin, Ill., where he had spent every morning of the past 15 years of his life. He was serving a lifetime sentence for selling 140 grams of crack cocaine — an amount about the size of a baseball.

It seemed like any other day until, at 10:30 a.m., a guard came into Douglas’s cell and told him he needed to call his lawyer. A few minutes later, he reached his lawyer, who informed him that, thanks to a new law, he would be a free man in a matter of hours. Douglas started sobbing.

“I don’t know what to say,” Douglas said through tears. “I’ll be glad to see my mom and my kids.”

The new law — the First Step Act — was the most sweeping overhaul of the criminal justice system in a decade, and included a provision making retroactive a 2010 law that reduced the egregious discrepancies between sentences for crack and powder cocaine. These discrepancies imposed such harsh, unbalanced penalties for crack cocaine relative to powder cocaine, that someone caught with an amount of crack the size of a candy bar would get roughly the same sentence as someone caught with a briefcase full of powder.