PUSHING BAD DRUG-CRIME POLICY

"Hey kid, wanna buy some crack?"

The image of drug pushers preying on children as they walked home
from school no doubt helped convince legislatures all over the
country to pass "drug-free zone" laws. Alabama lawmakers took the
idea to a national extreme, extending drug-free zones to three miles
around every school, college and public housing community. Alabama's
law mandates an added five years in prison for those convicted of
selling drugs within a drug-free zone.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. It turned out to be a
spectacular failure, according to a new national report.

"No other state approaches the scale chosen by lawmakers in Alabama,"
said a report issued last week by the Justice Policy Institute, a
nonprofit pushing for less incarceration. "Each zone covers an area
of more than 27 square miles."

So why is that so bad?

"There is no evidence ... showing any deterrent effect as a result of
the laws," said author Kevin Pranis. "The evidence that we found all
points in the other direction, no deterrent effect."

Not only do the laws not reduce the number of drug-related arrests in
the zones, the study's authors found that most cases don't even
involve drug sales to children. In Massachusetts, for example, a
study of three cities found that less than 1 percent of drug-free
zone cases were for selling drugs to youths. An analysis of hundreds
of drug-free zone cases in Connecticut identified only three cases
involving children, all of which were students arrested on school grounds.

But it's not just that drug-free zone laws don't work. They are
unfair and costly.

The laws more often ensnare blacks, who tend to live in more tightly
packed urban areas, than they do whites, the authors say. Those
offenders get an extra five years for the same crime, even though in
the vast majority of cases they weren't selling drugs to children.
Why should a drug seller, black or white, get five years added to his
sentence for selling drugs to an undercover cop 2 3/4 miles from a
school instead of 3 1/4 miles away?

The result is that we pack prisons with people serving longer
sentences, driving up the cost of corrections.

Many states have started rethinking their drug-free zone laws,
according to the report. New Jersey's sentencing commission
recommended pulling back the zones from 1,000 to 200 feet. Bills
introduced in Connecticut and Washington would decrease the zones to
200 feet. Utah's parole board recommends using enhanced sentencing
only on those convicted of selling or manufacturing drugs around children.

Alabama policymakers should take another look at our state's
drug-free zone law. It may have seemed like a good idea in 1987, when
then-Gov. Guy Hunt first pushed for drug-free zones, but it's not
now. Why keep a law that's expensive, unfair and doesn't work? That's
not being tough on drug crimes; it's pushing bad drug-crime policy.