DRUG-FREE ZONES REQUIRE CHANGES

New Jersey's drug-free school zone law wastes money, damages young
lives, has racially discriminatory outcomes and hasn't reduced
crime. Among those who want it changed are the governor, the
attorney general, many of the state's judges, the prosecutors of all
21 counties and the mayor of Newark, where its impact has been
especially harmful.

But the Legislature won't budge. Bills to amend the law are bottled
up in both the Senate and Assembly. A major reason seems to be the
fear of many members that political opponents will target them as
soft on crime if they vote for the proposals.

Now the reformers are planning a new strategy that they hope will
moderate the law's worst features and still have a chance of
overcoming the political obstacles. As Assembly Majority Leader
Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-Ewing, puts it: "If at first you don't succeed..."

The existing law establishes drug-free zones within 1,000 feet of a
school or school bus and 500 feet of parks, libraries, museums and
other public facilities. Anyone convicted of a drug crime within the
zone has an automatic three-year prison term tacked onto his
penalty. The judge isn't permitted to consider the circumstances.

No one disagrees that the state should throw the book at drug
dealers who actually peddle to children. But the approach taken by
the school-zone law has been disastrous, according to a 2005 report
by the New Jersey Commission to Review Criminal Sentencing.

The commission, which included law-enforcement officials, judges,
lawmakers, public defenders and prosecutors and other experts,
concluded: "The drug-free zone laws, as presently applied, have had
a devastatingly disproportionate impact on New Jersey's minority
community. Of no less importance, the available evidence strongly
suggests that the laws as presently written do not further what the
Legislature clearly intended to be their specific purpose: to
protect certain premises from the primary and secondary effects of
the illicit drug trade."

The commission found that there had been no increase in
drug-distribution offenses immediately outside the 1,000-foot
perimeter, as would be expected if the law was working. Instead,
arrests within the zone rose steadily over the years. Of the
school-zone cases the commission studied, none involved selling
drugs to minors -- the group that the law supposedly protects. Drug
sales tend to take place at nights and on weekends, when kids aren't
in school.

(The height of absurdity was reached when one Jessie Chambers was
sentenced to six years in prison for a cocaine offense because he
was arrested within 500 feet of the Fire Museum in New Brunswick.
The museum is open only by appointment and the bust took place after
midnight, when it is unlikely that Chambers was trying to sell to
youngsters. But the law mandated three additional years on the sentence.)

Ninety-six percent of all New Jersey inmates whose most serious
offense is a school-zone violation are African-American or Latino.
Yet these groups are only 27 percent of New Jersey's population. In
the whiter suburbs and rural areas, only two out of 10
drug-distribution offenses occur within school zones, the commission
found. But in the urban areas, which are blanketed by the forbidden
zones, eight of 10 do. "Basically, New Jersey has two different
punishments for the same crime," said Drug Policy Alliance New
Jersey, "with the severity of the punishment being based on
geography and, ultimately, on race."

The law not only is ineffective, but wasteful. When the commission
filed its report, New Jersey spent about $31,000 for each prisoner
jailed for a drug crime. That figure now is more than $45,000. And
the long-range costs of the policy are incalculable when measured in
the lives of nonviolent offenders whose futures are shattered by the
experience of being imprisoned with hard-core drug dealers and by
the barriers to honest employment they encounter when they emerge.

The commission called for reduction of the zones from 1,000 and 500
feet to 200 feet, while increasing the penalty for offenses within
the 200-foot zone (but without the mandatory minimum). This would
more closely link the zones to the schools themselves and produce a
stronger deterrent -- and greater protection for kids.

But bills to implement those recommendations, sponsored by Watson
Coleman and others, went nowhere. Legislators had made up their
minds and didn't want to be confused by the facts. Senate President
Dick Codey, D-West Orange, was quoted last year as saying: "I don't
even want to hear that we're going to change the law to allow this
within 1,000 feet of a school."

Now, backed by Gov. Jon Corzine's office and Attorney General Anne
Milgram, a compromise is in the works. Watson Coleman will introduce
a new bill later this month that would leave the drug-free zones at
1,000 and 500 feet, but give the judges back some sentencing
flexibility. They could weigh such factors as the exact location of
the offense, the suspect's record and whether school was in session
and kids were present. If the accused was arrested on school
property or possessed a firearm, however, the judge still
would have to hand down the three-year minimum sentence.

"Under certain circumstances, giving the judge discretion not to
impose a mandatory minimum sentence makes sense," Watson Coleman
told me. "Judges should be allowed to let the sentence fit the
crime. Mandatory minimums suggest that our judges aren't capable of
rendering justice, and that's not what our system is all about."

Attorney Barnett Hoffman, a retired Middlesex County judge who was
forced by the law to send many nonviolent addicts to prison, chaired
the 2005 sentencing commission. I asked him what he thought about
the compromise. He said he wanted to read Watson Coleman's bill
before venturing an opinion, but that from the description it would
be an improvement over the way the law now works.

He's right. The law as it stands does far more harm than good. Good
luck to those who are striving to persuade the Legislature to fix it.