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No issue in the world of federal sentencing has sparked more controversy or engendered more criticism than the punishment scheme for crack and powder cocaine. Congress set forth the basic crack and powder policy more than twenty years ago in a set of mandatory minimum sentencing statutes, producing the now infamous 100-to-1 quantity ratio. The U.S. Supreme Court's recent Booker decision making the Guidelines "effectively advisory" has added a challenging new set of issues for federal judges: what should district judges and circuit judges do when considering suggested Guideline crack sentences that seem excessive, particularly in relation to suggested sentences for comparable powder cocaine offenses? Booker creates a new urgency for debates about the appropriateness of federal cocaine sentencing policy and the judicial discretion to resist that policy in individual sentencing decisions.As highlighted in this Issue, debates over Booker and sentencing fairness are developing into what may become a "perfect storm" paving the way for meaningful reform a generation after Congress produced the 100-to-1 crack/powder ratio that many now consider deeply misguided. In these Observations, we quickly review the current complicated lay of the land and offer our suggestions for a productive path forward.

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Legal financial obligations serve a range of practical and ideological functions within the modern American criminal justice system. Criminal fines are punitive in nature and intended to reflect the severity of the offense as well as having a deterrent component. When assessed in conjunction with other financial penalties, including fees and restitution, the collective economic burden of these sanctions can be significant. An increasingly robust body of literature highlights the unequal impact and collateral harms of these punishments, especially those for people who fall into different socioeconomic groupings. There is a danger that the well-deserved opprobrium directed at fees and the cumulative effect of legal financial obligations will mask some benefits of properly targeted and calibrated fines. Here, we explore an opportunity for reform in the United States inspired by two Nordic sentencing policy models for fines. First, we look to Norwegian penal policy to consider expanding the use of fines as the primary sanction for a wider range of criminal offenses, especially in lieu of short terms of incarceration. We temper the impact of this change, especially for indigent defendants, by considering the implementation of a means-adjusted “day fine” system which are prevalent in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, and other individualized adjustments as in Norway. Taken together, these policies could reduce the American over-reliance on incarceration while modifying punitive fiscal sanctions in a manner that meets the purposes of punishment and seeks to minimize the unintended harms of financial punishment.

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