Monday Map: School Zones and Unequal Punishment

If you sell drugs in a city, there's a good chance you're doing it within 1,000 feet of a school. And if you're busted for certain drug crimes within 1,000 feet of a school in Massachusetts, you get a mandatory sentence of at least two years. A new report from the Massachusetts nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative provides further proof that this law, while well-intentioned has failed to stop crime while exacerbating the racial and economic disparities of our criminal justice system.

While the intended effect of the law is to deter drug dealers from selling near schools, the report finds that the zones are ignored because they are simply too big. In the map above of Springfield, Mass., the yellow dots represent school zones, and you can see that most of city is covered in yellow. The law effectively adds a mandatory minimum sentence to city dealers, and the impact is heavily weighted on minorities. African-Americans and Latinos make up 13% of the Massachusetts population, but 80% of drug arrests in school zones. Meanwhile, children in urban and rural areas use drugs at about the same rate.

The Massachusetts law has parallels around the country. The PPI report points to Alabama's school zone law as the nation's most extreme.  In the 1980s, Alabama passed a law enhancing sentences for people who sell drugs within three miles of a school.  This means that the entire populated portion of the state falls within a school zone.

The PPI report doesn't ask for a repeal of the Massachusetts law. It simply asks to reduce the zones to 100 feet - a distance we can see and estimate readily. Under this law, it would be clear to drug dealers that operating near a school will get them an increased punishment. That's the point of the law in the first place. "Deterrence works when there is a specific harsh consequence to a limited activity," the report says.

“The legislature erred,” said report co-author Aleks Kajstura. “The law hasn’t worked. Setting the zones so large means it can never be expected to work, and it comes with enormous social and economic costs.”

Two decades of experience with the zone law have proved that it is not in fact protecting children from drugs. Drug usage among children is not falling. Drug arrests are not less frequent inside of the zones than outside them. Zone law prosecutions only rarely involve situations where children are present.

The 1,000-foot zone law fails to repel drug activity from schools while having a fiscally and socially devastating impact on the state of Massachusetts. Each year, the zone enhancement law accounts for 796 years of imprisonment on top of the sentences imposed for the underlying drug offense. With the state facing a $3.1billion shortfall and incarceration costing the taxpayer $47,679 for each prisoner each year, the state can ill-afford this kind of inefficiency.

A 2006 report from the Drug Policy Alliance found cities across the country are blanketed by enhanced-punishment school zones like in Springfield. In the map below, almost all of New Haven, Connecticut, is within 1,500 feet of a school, day care center or housing project.