Experts want to shrink drug-free school zones

[Thom Little]

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."


http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1134024336110540.xml&coll=1

[Vidar]

1. Drugs are illegal, but they're more illegal here--meaningless concept.

[smirkymonkey]

2. What? I don't get it.

It's ok to sell and use illegal drugs outside the "circle" but not inside? I thought illegal drugs were illegal drugs no matter where you were selling them.

"We wanted to create safe harbors for schoolchildren and educators by literally pushing the pushers away from these protected areas."

Oh, I see - it's ok to sell drugs to kids OUTSIDE the protected area. What if you have one foot in the protected area and one out? :silly: Sounds pretty pointless to me.

[rodeodance]

3. Makes sense to me. They try to cover large area and end up diluting

any meaningful protection.---officials/cops spread too too thin.

[bemildred]

4. My kid just finished High School. It was like going to Drug Camp.

Four years of Drug Camp. This is such horseshit. These bastards are too cheap to do anything that might really help, so we get fed all this Tough Guy talk.

[ucmike]

5. the "school zone" law is ridiculous.

i lived in an affluent little suburb, where the main street ran by an elementary school. the local police would sit in the parking lot and wait for teens and out of towners (read: minorities) to drive by then would pull them over on some contrived traffic charge and use it as an excuse to search the cars. more than once, they found some highschool or college kid with a joint and charged him with the school zone law, thereby upping the charges and the fines.

i know its true, because they did it to two of my friends, not drug dealers, not gang bangers, just a kid with a dimebag, or a couple joints.

[carlosmartillo2]

6. If you lived in one of those zones

you might not want to see it shrink.

[newyawker99]

7. Hi carlosmartillo2!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast: