Felix Ayo Campbell is home a little sooner than expected.

The 31-year-old Roanoke man, imprisoned for much of the past 8¹₂ years on charges related to crack cocaine distribution, was among the region's first prisoners to be released under new, retroactive federal sentencing guidelines that took effect March 3.

Depending on which side you've listened to during the still-running debate about crack sentencing, the homecoming of Campbell and the others, many of them imprisoned for more than a decade, is either a sign of lawmakers coming to their senses about a stark racial imbalance in federal drug laws, or it shows a reckless disregard for public safety that will have "tragic, but predictable results," as U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said two months ago.

Campbell, understandably, leans toward the former view.

"Everybody's not the same," he said of the harsh penalties set for crack offenses since the 1980s. "Everybody's not running around killing people."

'Real time for real people'

For Campbell, resentencing meant being released about six months early -- but it also meant skipping most of his time at a halfway house program intended as a transition back to life outside prison.

"I didn't realize how much you need the halfway house," he mused last week.

But Campbell said he has a good support system of family and friends to help him while he studies for his commercial driver's license and looks for work. He guessed that employment, which is required by his probation of the next four years, will be hard to find.

"Not too many people hire felons," Campbell said.

Nationally, the U.S. Sentencing Commission predicted, the average sentence reduction for eligible federal crack prisoners is about 27 months. The average federal sentence for crack offenders in 2006 was 122 months in prison. In comparison, for powder cocaine offenders it was 85 months, the sentencing commission reported last year.

A sampling of filings in the Western District of Virginia from the past month showed crack sentence reductions ranging from five years or more to nothing. The denials were often in cases where the defendant had been deemed a career offender or had received a mandatory minimum sentence.

No matter how much time is at stake, "That's real time for real people," said Mary Price, general counsel for Washington, D.C.-based Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group that has lobbied for years to change cocaine sentencing.

Campbell said it was hard to describe how good it felt to be home. Convicted in 2000 of possessing crack with intent to distribute it and of being a felon in possession of a gun, Campbell said his 10-year sentence, already lessened by good behavior, had nearly run its course when a judge's order dropping his sentence to time served took effect March 21.

Now the federal probation office will monitor his activities, imposing drug tests or searching for weapons or other contraband. Campbell said that compared with prison, keeping up with a probation officer won't be a problem.

"Eight and a half years -- you mature a lot," he said.

'Perfect storm of reform'

Decades of debate about crack sentencing have focused on two points: the sharp disparity between penalties for crack and powder cocaine offenses, and the racial inequity fostered by that disparity.

Even with the revised guidelines, it takes a much smaller amount of crack than of powder cocaine to trigger years-long prison sentences, with the result that crack offenders tend to draw much longer sentences than those convicted of powder crimes. That's because the guideline change tended to lessen the severity of the penalties a defendant faces but could not adjust a system of mandatory minimum sentences enacted by Congress in the 1980s.

Crack and powder are forms of the same drug, two decades of critics have pointed out, ingested differently but creating similar effects.

The most recent survey of drug use by the U.S. Office of Applied Studies, from 2006, shows that about 80 percent of people who reported using crack in the past month were white or Hispanic.

In the same time period, 81 percent of people charged with federal crack offenses were black, the sentencing commission found.

Some observers blame the mismatch on a racial bias within the justice system, others on an enforcement focus on inner-city, mostly black neighborhoods, where sidewalk dealing may be more visible than drug transactions in other communities.

Last year, citing "almost universal criticism" for the cocaine sentencing structure, the sentencing commission set new guidelines that narrowed the gap between powder- and crack-related penalties and urged Congress to change the parallel system of mandatory minimums. This year, the sentencing commission made its new guidelines retroactive, and an estimated 19,500 prisoners across the country, of whom 16,700 are black, became eligible for reduced sentences. The three former prisoners who were interviewed for this story are black.

In the Western District of Virginia, sentence reductions could mean early release for 113 people by the end of 2008. The U.S. attorney's office said 68 were released in March.

Ryan King, a policy analyst at The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., said that even with the guideline change, someone must still possess 100 times more powder cocaine than crack to trigger mandatory five- and 10-year sentences.

Legislation to shift the mandatory sentences has never gained traction in Congress. But King thought "a perfect storm of reform" may be brewing with the guideline change, congressional hearings and a U.S. Supreme Court decision in December that federal judges could consider the 100-to-1 ratio as justification for below-guideline sentences in crack cases.

People should be held accountable when they break the law, King said, but sentences in crack cases are "disproportionate to the crime."

'Very violent criminals back in our communities'

Decidedly on the other side of the debate is John Brownlee, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia.

The resentencings have "placed very violent criminals back in our communities immediately ... with the message that the system treated them unfairly," Brownlee said last week. "I can only imagine what will happen."

The district has the fourth-highest number of cases affected by the new guidelines in the nation, and Brownlee said there are likely to be horrendous consequences as released prisoners re-offend.

Anthony Scott Carter said that won't happen in his case.

Carter, 38, actually had already served four years and 11 months in prison, gone through a halfway house program and been released to electronic home monitoring when the order came through reducing his sentence to time served.

The sentence had been Carter's second time in federal prison on crack charges. The father of two, back living with his wife in Roanoke and working at a furniture plant, said he's ready to stay out of trouble, and that the religion he found in prison will help.

"Now it's a whole different situation," Carter said. "This time I brought the word with me."

Carter's sentence reduction, which arrived after he had been released from prison, was one of 142 that Brownlee said his office opposed in March. Prosecutors filed an objection to every sentence reduction of which they were notified, he said.

That brought a rebuke from U.S. District Judge James Jones, the district's chief judge, who wrote last month in an opinion granting a sentence reduction that "the government's blanket objection in all cases does not assist the court in making that decision, and, in fact, hinders it."

Jones declined last week to comment further on the opinion.

Brownlee, emphasizing his respect for Jones, said he was just following the lead of higher-ups at the Justice Department who opposed making the guidelines retroactive. He said his office's opposition to the resentencings has been nuanced, with some filings indicating that the prosecutor will "defer to the court," which is "a clear signal that this one can go," Brownlee explained.

Brownlee said he expects his office's prosecution totals to drop this year because of the time spent on old crack cases.

A Republican appointee, he also saw significance in a Democrat-led Congress' decision not to block the sentencing commission's revisions, as had been done before.

"Different leadership, a different result," Brownlee said.

A spokeswoman for the Eastern District of Virginia, which has the most crack resentencing cases in the country, said the U.S. attorney's office there is not opposing every resentencing.

Department of Justice spokesman Peter Carr said the 94 federal judicial districts worked out various procedures for handling the retroactive guidelines. "The Department will apply the new rule as written," Carr wrote in an e-mail.

'14 years on my first charge'

Anthony D. Williamson was 20 when he was indicted and 21 when he was convicted and sentenced on a bevy of charges as part of an operation that was bringing drugs from New York to Roanoke.

Now 34, he was released March 10 after a judge's order took 31 months from his sentence. Williamson figured the resentencing actually saved him about 20 months in prison since he'd already been given a release date in November 2009.

Williamson had maintained strong family connections throughout his years in prison and quickly returned to the Bronx, where some of his relatives live.

During his years in prison, Williamson took one course after another -- everything from small business management to yoga to baking to public speaking. He finished with a nearly yearlong course in welding and said he's now applying for welding work while he studies for a commercial driver's license.

Reflecting on the switch between life now and how he spent his 20s and early 30s, Williamson said he'd been given a heavy lesson in personal responsibility.

"I was taught better," Williamson said of his involvement with drug selling. Still, he said, the penalty seemed especially harsh for someone without a prior criminal record.

"I don't think I deserved to do 14 years on my first charge. I understand selling drugs hurts families, but shoot ...," Williamson's voice trailed off.

"I did the crime, did the time," he said. "But it's over and now I've got to get back into society."

Staff researcher Belinda Harris contributed to this report.