Experts
want to shrink drug-free school zones
Panel calls 200 feet fairer than
the current 1,000
Thursday, December 08, 2005 • BY ROBERT SCHWANEBERG
• Star-Ledger Staff
The city of Newark covers 24 square
miles. It has 129 schools, each surrounded by a 1,000-foot
"drug-free" zone. Similar 500-foot zones surround each of
its 150 public housing complexes, 69 parks, 13 libraries and
two museums.
Plotted on a map, those overlapping
circles form one big blob, within which the sale of drugs
carries especially heavy penalties. Disregarding the
airport, 76 percent of the city falls within that "drug-free
zone."
Yesterday a blue-ribbon commission
displayed that map as Exhibit A in its case for shrinking
those zones to 200 feet in order to make them fairer and
more effective.
"We stand here as a united group saying
that the present drug zone laws do not protect our
children," Barnett Hoffman, the retired judge who chairs the
New Jersey Commission to Review Criminal Sentencing, said at
a Trenton news conference. The commission includes
prosecutors and defense lawyers, as well as representatives
of the Department of Corrections, parole bureau, judiciary
and public.
"The laws as written are just plain
ineffective. The cities themselves have become school
zones," Hoffman said. "The point is these huge zones
actually dilute the special protection the zones are
supposed to provide."
Assistant Attorney General Ronald
Susswein, one of the architects of the original 1987
drug-free school zone law, said: "We wanted to create safe
harbors for schoolchildren and educators by literally
pushing the pushers away from these protected
areas."
But he said the law "failed" in cities
like Newark because if drug dealers move far enough away
from one school to escape the heavier punishment, they move
into an adjoining school zone.
"They're going to get the same punishment
anywhere in these towns, so they're going to pick the best
spot," Susswein said.
The commission backed up that conclusion
with arrest statistics from Newark for Jan. 1 to Sept. 6 of
this year.
If the zones were working as intended,
there should be a spike in arrests just outside the
1,000-foot circle, where dealers know they face lighter
punishment, Hoffman explained. Instead, there were actually
fewer arrests (252) made 1,000 to 1,200 feet from schools
than at 700 to 800 feet (266 arrests). There were 274
arrests within 200 feet of a school.
Hoffman said that shows the zone has "no
impact" in deterring the peddling of drugs near schools.
What it has done, he said, is to impose particularly harsh
penalties on minorities who sell drugs in densely populated
areas blanketed by drug-free zones.
"Nearly every offender, 96 percent" of
those in prison for violating the drug-free zones, "is
either black or Hispanic," Hoffman said.
Susswein said shrinking the zones to 200
feet would make them "meaningful." Hoffman said the
15-member commission unanimously agreed that 200 feet is the
right distance because it keeps dealers from setting up shop
next to a school but is close enough that they can see a
school is nearby and know they should move away.
The commission also proposes increasing
the maximum penalties for drug dealing inside a drug-free
zone to 10 years in prison, up from five. It would eliminate
the existing mandatory minimum sentences, giving judges more
discretion.
A bill implementing the panel's
recommendations was approved Monday by the Assembly Law and
Public Safety Committee. Yesterday, however, Sen. Bernard
Kenny (D-Hudson), a member of the commission, said the
measure will not pass both houses of the Legislature before
the lame-duck session ends Jan. 10.
Kenny said the bill needs "to garner
bipartisan support," which it did not have Monday, when
neither of the two Republicans on the Assembly committee
supported it, and one questioned why the commission had not
proposed allowing each municipality to set its own drug-free
zones.
Kenny said senators also want assurances
that Gov.-elect Jon Corzine will support the measure. He
said he will "prefile" a bill today for consideration in the
new two- year legislative term that begins at noon Jan.
10.
© 2005 The Star-Ledger. Used by NJ.com with
permission.
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