Acting Attorney General Mukasey is addressing Congress today, in a last-minute attempt to prevent retroactive application of the easing of crack guidelines. The story in the Washington Post has many problems with it.

First off, no one is addressing the truth that I've experienced first hand, being a former federal prisoner: most of the "gang member" crack dealers are profiled as gang members. Just as I was listed as a "Drug Kingpin" due to the weight of the paper involved in my case (not the actual LSD amount), most young black men convicted of crack offenses are called "gang members" based on little more than speculation.

They certainly aren't convicted of being gang members. A tattoo of a girlfriend's name becomes a gang affiliation mark. A scar from a bullet wound. Clothing worn when arrested. There are endless facts that can be taken out of context, and used to assert a gang membership, even when this is patently false. I did five years with a man out of Compton. He had no gang affiliation whatsoever. Yet he was listed as a blood, because the snitch in his case was affiliated with the Bloods, and if he was supplying a gang member affiliate, clearly it was because he was in the gang himself.

Secondly, no one is mentioning what the actual release of these prisoners, assuming EVERY one eligible for immediate release gets it, would look like. 1,600 sounds like a lot, until you break it down by population. Manhattan, for instance, would get 8 crack offenders (proportionally by population). Some crime wave.

What we seem to be experiencing here is another example of Incarcerex - Mukasey is under fire for his position on "waterboarding," the administration has lost credibility and public favor, the Iraq war is a complicated and difficult issue that is hurting the administration as well - why not set the stage for another "soft on crime" debate?

The Washington post story suggests that a majority of crack users and dealers are black, while a majority of cocaine users and dealers are white. This is a stereotype; another racist lie. Whites are about 70% of the U.S. population, blacks are under 15%. Drug use is consistent (not statistically significant in deviation) amongst all races, thus a majority of crack users and dealers are white. A majority of cocaine users and dealers are white. A majority of people prosecuted and imprisoned for crack use and dealing are black. There is a difference between stating context versus stating "a majority of crack offenders are black, while a majority of cocaine offenders are white."

This cry from Mukasey is nothing new. When the Sentencing Commission first pondered removing the disparity in 1995, there was outcry about the "Crime Wave" that would result from the release of crack offenders. Just after Apprendi vs. New Jersey, a key Supreme Court case that called into question federal criminal procedure as a whole, the Justice Department sounded the alarms of an impending crime wave, which also did not materialize.

In the end, the Justice Department, which should be acting in the interests of its citizens, instead is acting like an institution worried about its grip on resources and power. Unfortunately, these are measured in part by the number of people committed to its charge. And rather than seek justice, it seeks to add people to its cages, and fights any attempt at removing them. Mukasey is just another head on the hydra of a broken system. Fixing the crack-cocaine disparity is just one scale removed from the beast, but that's how we can eventually defeat it - not by removing its many heads, but by exposing its body.

When the "Crime Wave" of crack offenders fails to materialize, another scale will be removed. I believe between this and the political context of an election year is the truth of Mukasey's actions, and unfortunately mainstream media is failing to expose any of it through contextual reporting, relying instead on isolated facts and lackluster analysis.

It's high time they exposed the same shenanigans being perpetrated on us.