This crusade involved a compromise between conservative and liberal impulses in which 'big dealers' were identified as villians, while middle-class youth and nonwhites (but the latter only insofar as they were rarely big dealers in a racially stratified drug trade) were reconceived as victims. The results of our contextualized analysis allow us to make sense of otherwise anomalous findings and suggest that while there may be a trend toward equality in American criminal sentencing, there are also patterns of differential leniency and severity that can only be revealed when changing conceptions of race and crime are taken into account. (Author abstract)