“Snowfall” will lean on history in Season 5 to buttress the plot and character arcs that turned the FX series about the plight of a crack kingpin and his family in South Central L.A. into one of the most compelling drama series on TV.
As Season 4 bowed, Damson Idris’ Franklin Saint was raring to take back his place as one of the most powerful drug lords in the world. Now three years later, he and his crew face a challenge largely out of their control but “are still in the game,” as showrunner Dave Andron puts it.
It’s a game Andron says is complicated with the historical backdrop of 1986, a critical year in the trajectory of federal drug sentencing laws that led to decades of mass incarceration for Black communities – and a year remembered for the death of a rising sports superstar.
Len Bias was two days removed from being drafted as the second overall pick by the NBA’s Boston Celtics when he died of cardiac arrhythmia induced by a cocaine overdose. Bias was 22.
“Len Bias’ death started this kind of firestorm,” Andron said in a recent Television Critics’ Association panel, discussing how Season 5’s premier, which airs Wednesday night, spotlights the former University of Maryland star’s death. “It became the reason why all of a sudden everybody was up in arms. Even though his death was not rock-related, ultimately it led to Congress passing this really Draconian sentencing law… All of a sudden [cocaine] was on the radar of people it hadn’t been before, and yet the government completely bungled the response. You might even go so far as to say [officials] used this as an excuse to lock up a generation of Black people.”
Following Bias’ death, lawmakers passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which was known colloquially as the “Len Bias Law” and created a mandatory minimum sentencing for cocaine distribution. The law was heavily criticized because, while it attempted to strengthen federal efforts against controlled substances, it deepened the racial inequities in federal drug sentencing by establishing a sentencing disparity between the distribution of powder and crack cocaine of 100 to 1.
“We are definitely dealing with how all of a sudden the official crackdown, no pun intended, on crack, is with Black people. Where all of a sudden if you have some cocaine, you get one year, if you have some crack, you do eight,” executive producer Walter Mosley said.
The law cracked down much heavier on low-income communities, specifically communities of color, because the price of crack cocaine was much lower than that of powder, which was more often distributed across affluent, white areas, according to the ACLU. Ultimately, medical experts determined that, from a pharmacological standpoint, the drug is equally harmful in powder and rock form.
“There should have been no difference between sentencing for powder cocaine or rock cocaine,” Andron said. “It really was responsible for this era of mass incarceration that we are in today and still feeling the effects of its massive fulcrum point in the last 40 years.”
Data from the ACLU states that, before the federal mandatory minimum was established, the average drug sentence for Black people was 11% higher than for white people. Four years after the law took effect, the sentencing disparity skyrocketed as the average sentence for a Black person was 49% higher.
“We are beginning to talk about the impact of racism on the trade that Franklin and his crew are involved in,” Mosley said of Season 5.
The racial disparities in mass incarceration were exacerbated even further by the passing of the 1994 Crime Bill, which imposed even tougher prison sentences for federal drug trafficking charges.
It wasn’t until 2010 that Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the disparity between rock and powder to 18 to 1. In 2011, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to apply the updated law retroactively to people who were sentenced before it went into effect. Last year, the House of Representatives passed the EQUAL Act, which aimed to erase the sentencing disparity altogether, though it was stalled in the Senate.
As for how “Snowfall” will handle the implications of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, Mosley said it won’t lack for the storylines that have become a signature of the show.
“There still is a grind, the day-to-day grind, and there is always survival,” Mosley said. “That’s part of the baseline. We jumped a bunch of time in between seasons, and part of the idea behind that is now they have kind of everything they wanted. You know, we wanted to really see them enjoy, for as much as you can in the game, the spoils of their labor.
“They were doing this for a reason — to make money,” Mosley concluded. “So, what’s it look like when you have all the money that you ever could have wanted? It felt important to be in that place with them for a little while.”
Season 5 of “Snowfall” premieres Wednesday night on FX.