Philadelphia Weekly

The signs started going up in 1987. By early the following year, the white metal signs were everywhere in New Jersey. West Orange alone spent $3,500 to put up 142 signs. The signs had just four words--set in ITC Bauhaus Bold, a font that seems to epitomize 1980s design--and were intended to send a clear message: DRUG-FREE SCHOOL ZONE.

In theory, New Jersey's Drug-Free School Zone law punishes drug dealers caught within 1,000 feet of schools and within 500 feet of public parks and housing, libraries and museums, with a mandatory minimum sentence of at least three years. But 20 years after the signs first went up, most of them are gone, especially in the cities. They've been vandalized or stolen and not replaced.

The law, though, remains, as do its disastrous effects. Three years ago, New Jersey's Commission to Review Criminal Sentencing issued a report excoriating the drug-free school zone law, which was originally passed with the intention of keeping drug dealers away from schoolchildren. But it created zones so large no one knew where they began, despite the signs; the number of drug dealers caught selling to children was statistically insignificant.

The Commission reported 36 percent of New Jersey's prisoners were incarcerated for nonviolent drug law violations, compared with the national average of 20 percent. Nearly every offender convicted and incarcerated under the drug-free school zone law--an astounding 96 percent--was either black or Hispanic.

The Commission deemed this the result of an "urban effect." New Jersey is the densest state in the country; its cities are even denser. Jersey City, the state's second largest, has more people per square mile than Philadelphia and Chicago. The law means that some of the Garden State's cities are dominated by drug-free school zones. Discounting the city's airport, 76 percent of Newark is covered by drug-free school zones.

Jersey's towns and rural areas have far fewer schools and parks than do its cities. Camden is just nine square miles, yet has 74 buildings and parks covered by drug-free school zones, adding up to 52 percent of the city. Mansfield Township, in nearby Burlington County--classified as a rural area--has only 6 percent of its area covered by such zones.

As urbanization increases, so does the percentage of area covered by drug-free school zones. In 2004, the Commission reported, 19 percent of rural drug arrests were in drug-free school zones, compared to 82 percent of urban ones. New Jersey's urban areas contain a much higher concentration of minorities and poor people than do rural ones. African-Americans and Hispanics make up roughly 26 percent of Jersey's population but 66 percent of urban centers. Another report on the state showed that nearly three out of every four incoming convicted drug law offenders are African-American.

New Jersey's drug-free school zone law creates two sets of drug dealing crimes in the state: one for rural residents and one for urban ones. One for the rich and one for the poor. One for whites and one for blacks and Hispanics. Minorities are punished far more harshly for the same crimes as white people. Essentially, it's American apartheid.

All of this comes with great cost to the state. A Drug Policy Alliance report released in May estimated it costs the state more than $330 million to incarcerate drug law violators each year. Putting a drug dealer or user in jail does nothing to stop the drug supply, but it does have its cost in lost wages (and therefore lost tax revenue), as well as the immeasurable costs in broken families, parentless children and limited opportunities for convicted drug offenders upon release. The report estimated a $700 million loss in wages for those convicted of drug law offenses. As UCLA drug policy analyst Mark Kleiman has put it: "Arrests and prison terms are costs, not benefits, of policy."

New Jersey's Sentencing Commission recommended scaling back the school zones to 200 feet while increasing the penalty to a second-degree crime, one without a mandatory sentence. While the crime would actually carry a higher penalty, convicted drug law offenders would be eligible for parole and leniency from a judge depending on the situation. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a vast improvement over the current law.

The smaller school zones would also be more effective, the Commission reported, as it would establish clearer guidelines of what constitutes a drug-free school zone. "I suspect that few who read this report and study its findings will be unmoved," wrote retired Judge Barnett Hoffman in 2005 in the introduction to the report.
 
He suspected wrong. New Jersey's legislators haven't only been unmoved, they've looked for a way to keep the profoundly discriminatory laws in place. Senate President Richard Codey came out in favor of the current law. Others wish to expand them.

"I think the entire city of Trenton should be a drug-free zone," State Sen. Shirley Turner told the Trenton Times.

Legislation instituting the Sentencing Commission's recommendations has been introduced and then forgotten. But last October, Gov. Corzine formed a task force to look at the 2005 report; it seconded the Commission's recommendations, getting all 21 of the state's county prosecutors to back the changes.

Last week, the Senate finally approved a change, implementing two of the Commission's recommendations. The offense has been upped to a second-degree crime, but judges will have the opportunity to consider probation or parole.

Under the bill, however, the drug-free school zones will remain at 1,000 feet, a distance the Sentencing Commission found ineffective in reducing drug dealing near schools. (The same conclusion has been delineated in many other studies of drug-free school zones.) The Commision provided evidence as to why a 200-foot radius would be more effective. 

It's not surprising lawmakers ignored it, though: The Commission also found the distances of 1,000 feet and 500 feet for non-school buildings were come up with at random. No thought or research was put into the original law, passed at the height of America's drug-use panic in the 1980s.

Conclusions like the ones made by New Jersey's Sentencing Commission have been made in studies of places as diverse as Utah, Indiana, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Pennsylvania's drug-free school zone law is nearly identical to New Jersey's. It's time a legislator in this state has the guts to fight to change the law on this side of the Delaware.