Word: cracking
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...Beastie Boys hollering, "You gotta fight for your right--to party!" and Public Enemy saying, "Don't believe the hype," and Hammer's harem-style balloon pants. Then gangsta rap: N.W.A. rapping "F____ tha police"; Snoop drawling "187 on an undercover cop"; and Tupac crying, "Even as a crack fiend, mama/ You always was a black queen, mama." Then Mary J. Blige singing hip-hop soul; Guru and Digable Planets mixing rap with bebop; the Fugees "Killing me softly with his song"; Puffy mourning Biggie...
...much impact on the heart of the drug problem, abuse by long-term urban addicts. Even the usually hard-line drug czar Barry McCaffrey has written that "we can't incarcerate our way out of the drug problem." He has urged Congress to reduce mandatory minimums for crack, which are currently 100 times as heavy as those for powdered coke and impact most on minority youth...
...streets. In places like New York there are more black and Hispanic kids in prison than in college. That injustice may have played a role in the fate of Derrick Smith, a New York City youth who in October faced a sentence of 15 years to life for selling crack. At the sentence hearing a distraught Smith told the judge, "I'm only 19. This is terrible." He then hurled himself out of a courtroom window and fell 16 stories to his death. "He didn't kill anyone; he didn't rob anyone," says his mother. "This happened because...
...Committee didn't even hold hearings on the bill that created the current minimums, which coasted to victory just in time for the 1986 midterm elections. Congress and the President last year added a new mandatory minimum to the books: five years for 5 g of crystal meth, the crack of the '90s. Mandatory minimums remain political beasts, and it would probably take Nixon-goes-to-China leadership from a Republican to turn public opinion against them. Either that or more Jean Valjeans serving 10-year sentences for stealing steaks...
Superintendent Thomas Payzant has since vowed to crack down on the truant teachers. While their "behavior is unacceptable," he maintains, "parents are responsible for students many more hours than teachers and have got to do some monitoring of homework." But what happens when such home support is lacking? While their suburban peers return home to parents eager to boot up the computer to help with a research paper, many inner-city students don't have the same resources or have parents who are undereducated or too busy making ends meet to help with homework...