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Shrinking the zones and doing away with mandatory minimum sentences would eliminate disparities and even make the zones more effective, because drug dealers who now cannot avoid the zones would have incentives to stay away from schools, Scotti said.

The bill _ sponsored by Assemblyman Peter J. Barnes, D-Middlesex, and Assemblywoman Mary T. Previte, D-Camden _ passed out of the Law and Public Safety Committee on Monday. It now heads to the full Assembly.

It would reduce the zones to 200 feet from their present size of 1,000 feet around schools and 500 feet around public parks, public housing and other public buildings.

Offenders would face five to 10 years in prison, compared to three to five years under the current statute. But judges would have greater discretion in sentencing, since the revised law would not set mandatory minimums. Advocates said giving judges more leeway would keep prisons from being crowded with urban drug criminals while their suburban counterparts receive lighter sentences.

The proposed law follows a recommendation from the state Commission to Review Criminal Sentencing, which reported that the zones presently put entire cities in such zones and resulted in the law being applied almost exclusively to blacks and Hispanics.

"We've been saying this for years, but this is the first time we have evidence-based data," Scotti said.

The 15-member commission, which includes lawmakers, state officials and criminal justice experts, found that 96 percent of offenders convicted and incarcerated for a drug-free zone offense in New Jersey are either black or Hispanic.

Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.
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Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Drug-free school zones keeping prison cells full

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 12/14/05
BY JON SHURE

It seemed like a good idea at the time. If you want to be serious about fighting crime, make rules that are very strict and inflexible.

A prime example was the law that says if someone is convicted of a drug crime within 1,000 feet of a school, they will be subject to a more severe penalty than someone who is arrested 1,001 feet from a school. Caught within the zone, you face a mandatory prison sentence of three years with no parole. Even a judge can't change it. Outside the zone, though, plea bargains, probation, treatment and the like are much-used alternatives to incarceration.

Over the 18 years that law has been on the books, it has gotten results ‹ just not good ones. A greater share of New Jersey inmates ‹ 33 percent ‹ is in prison for drug-related crimes than in any other state. In 1986, only 11 percent of inmates in New Jersey were incarcerated for drug-related offenses.

In 1986, inmates convicted of violent crimes accounted for 61 percent of the state's prison population, compared to 40 percent today.

In 1986, 23 percent of whites and 22 percent of blacks entering prison were charged with drug offenses. But today, 64 percent of New Jersey's prisoners are black, while the state's black population is 14.5 percent of the total. And, over the past 20 years, spending in New Jersey on corrections ‹ building, maintaining and staffing prisons ‹ has risen by about 500 percent.

The bottom line is that the school-zone law and a companion measure that also sets a 1,000-foot zone around parks, day care centers and other facilities where children are likely to be present have had a disproportionate racial impact when it comes to punishment for relatively low-level, nonviolent drug-related crimes.

To figure out why, just go to a city. In cities, it is hard not to be 1,000 feet from a school or public place. According to one report, there is just a tiny pocket of Hudson County near the Holland Tunnel entrance that is not covered by the laws. But in suburbs and rural areas, it is fairly easy to be out of range.

It's not as though the mandatory minimum sentencing law was aimed at minorities. The intent was to help protect children from drugs. It just goes about it in a seriously ill-advised manner. Consider this: A study by the Boston University School of Public Health on a similar law in Massachusetts found that fewer than 1 percent of the people convicted of drug sales within a school zone were selling to minors or were even on school property.

Fortunately, in New Jersey there is a vehicle for restoring some sanity to the process. The Commission to Review Criminal Sentencing, created in January 2004 by then-Gov. James E. McGreevey, recently recommended establishing zones of 200 feet around schools and 500 feet in other areas covered by the law. Drug-dealing in the covered areas would be punishable with prison terms of five to 10 years, but without any mandatory minimum.

It's a win-win recommendation: protection for children and discretion for judges so that if they feel, for example, that drug treatment (which costs less and often has better results) makes more sense than time in prison, they can make sure it happens.

Adopting this and other reforms would fit in with a national trend that has eluded New Jersey. Even New York, which instituted some of the nation's harshest drug laws under Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, has been moving in the other direction. And, not long ago, Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell signed a law aimed at moving nonviolent drug offenders more quickly into treatment.

Reforming the get-tough laws of the past often is uniting liberals and conservatives. The moral qualms of one group are merging with the spending worries of the other. As stated in a 2004 report by the Vera Institute of Justice, "Fiscal concerns are providing common ground ‹ and a political safe haven ‹ for officials of all political stripes looking to temper reliance on incarceration."

Whatever the motivation, let's welcome the effort. And when supporters of reform are attacked for being "soft on crime," as they are certain to be, stand up for common sense.

Jon Shure is president of New Jersey Policy Perspective, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization in Trenton that conducts research on state issues.