Dallas County Sheriff chief deputy Randy Pugh didn’t take long in answering the question asking if crack cocaine remains a problem. “Absolutely,” he said. “There’s a heck of a lot of it still out there.”

Thursday, a group advocating criminal justice reform, released a report saying Alabama remains one of more than a dozen states in the country that still issue much harder sentences for crimes related to crack cocaine than those with powder cocaine.

The Sentencing Project said in their report that treating the two types of the same drug differently is not only a fairness issue but a monetary one.

In an Associated Press report Thursday, the Washington, D.C.-based group said, The disparity is unfair to black drug users who are more likely to be charged with crack cocaine offenses and end up with longer prison terms than cocaine users of other races. It also leads to long sentences for low-level, nonviolent drug offenders that cost cash-strapped states millions of dollars in prison expenses that could be saved if the disparities were removed.

“Fiscal pressure to tighten state corrections budgets, along with mounting evidence documenting the unfair and unwarranted structure of these sentencing laws, suggests that lawmakers should re-examine the sentencing differential between crack and powder cocaine,” the group said. “High rates of incarceration are expensive to maintain and sentencing changes … can effectively conserve resources without adverse effects on public safety.”

Local district attorney Michael Jackson said he too favors changes in the sentencing structure for the two drugs.

“I think they should be treated exactly the same,” Jackson said. “You are talking about two drugs with the same ingredients. To treat them separately is simply not right.”

Jackson said his opinion is also based on the amount of drug-related crimes happening in Dallas County.

“Just about every crime in Dallas County is drug related in one way or another,” Jackson said. “So to give one criminal a break because they had powder cocaine and not crack, just doesn’t make sense.”

Until last August, the federal government had a 100-to-1 ratio in sentencing people for possession of the two cocaine types. That meant someone caught with 5 grams of crack cocaine was sentenced the same as someone caught with 500 grams of powder. The Fair Sentencing Act signed by President Barack Obama reduced the federal ratio to 18-to-1.

Thirteen states currently have laws under which people are sentenced more harshly for crack crimes than ones involving powder cocaine. Two of those — Missouri and New Hampshire — have ratios above that of the federal government.

New Hampshire’s ratio is 28-to-1. The other states that treat the two types of cocaine differently for sentencing purposes are Alabama, Arizona, Iowa, California, Maine, Maryland, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Vermont and Virginia.

– Associated Press reports contributed to this report.