“Sentencing enhancement zones” fail to protect children and worsen racial disparity in incarceration

Most states have laws that are intended to protect children by creating enhanced penalties for various crimes that occur within a certain distance of schools. These laws sound positive, but our research has shown that most geography-based sentencing enhancements do not work, will not work and have serious negative effects.

In Massachusetts, certain drug offenses committed within 1,000 feet of schools and 100 feet of parks are punished with a longer sentence. The intent is noble: protect children from harmful activity by creating an incentive for bad activity to move elsewhere. The flaw is that the distance is too large. To create a safety zone around schools, the area to be protected needs to be small enough to incentivize moving illegal activity elsewhere. Imposing a higher penalty over an entire city or state by blanketing it in overlapping enhancement zones nullifies the legislatures’ effort to afford some places special protection. Simply put, when a legislature says that everywhere is special, no place is special.

These laws were a noble, if naive, experiment when they began sweeping the nation in the late 1980s and 1990s. But now the evidence is in. They have not worked to move areas around schools safer, and the extreme distance in these laws ensure that they will never serve the intended deterrent effect. But what these laws have done is consume criminal justice resources that could otherwise go to enforcing existing laws that directly and effectively protect children from being involved in criminal activity and to create a two-tiered system of justice: a harsher one for dense urban areas with numerous schools and overlapping zones and a milder one for rural and suburban areas, where schools are relatively few and far between.

Our first of a kind research mapped every sentencing enhancement zone in urban, rural and suburban Hampden County, and quantified the race and ethnicity of the people who live inside and outside of the zones. We found that residents of urban areas are five times more likely to live in a sentencing enhancement zone than those in rural areas, and Latinos are more than twice as likely as Whites to live in a sentencing enhancement zone. We explored the wisdom of using a large distance of 1,000 feet for a geography based deterrent. We demonstrated that 1,000 feet is simply too large of a distance and the legislature erred assuming that everyone within 1,000 feet of a school can influence people at the school.

Reports

• The Geography of Punishment: How Huge Sentencing Enhancement Zones Harm Communities, Fail to Protect Children

  by Aleks Kajstura, Peter Wagner and William Goldberg, July 2008.
  This first-of-a-kind report mapped every sentencing enhancement zone in urban, rural and suburban Hampden County, and quantified the race and ethnicity of the people who live inside and outside of the zones.

• Reaching too far, coming up short: How large sentencing enhancement zones miss the mark

  by Aleks Kajstura, Peter Wagner and Leah Sakala
  January, 2009.
  This followup report found that Blacks are 26 times as likely, and Latinos 30 times as likely as White residents to be convicted and receive a mandatory sentencing enhancement zone sentence.

Articles and op-eds

• Smart on crime, letter to the editor, from Peter Wagner, Boston Herald, Feb 4, 2011
• School Zone Laws Don't Work, by Peter Wagner (letter), Valley Advocate, March 12, 2009.
• PRRAC Researcher Report: Sentencing Enhancement Zones Fail to Protect Children, by Aleks Kajstura & Peter Wagner Poverty & Race November/December 2008.

Related advocacy and resources

• Testimony before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary of the Massachusetts General Court in support of H2267/S908, “An Act to Reform the ‘School Zone’ Law for Drug Offenses.” The bill, which would reduce the size of Massachusetts' school zones to 100 feet, would make the law more effective in protecting children while reducing racial disparities in sentenceing.
• Testimony to the Rhode Island Senate in opposition to S2644 which would have imposed longer sentences for felonies committed within 1,000 feet of educational institutions.
• 1,000 feet is further than you think is a graphical introduction to distance, and a version as a powerpoint presentation.

Coverage of our work:

• Zones: Effective Deterrent? Are they an effective deterrent, or just a lever to force lesser pleas from drug offenders? The new DA Talks About Drug-Free School Zones, by Maureen Turner, Valley Advocate, March 18, 2011
• Rethinking Drug-Free School Zones: Gov. Patrick proposes changing a policy critics say is unfair and ineffective, by Maureen Turner, Valley Advocate February 10, 2011
• The too-long arm of the law, by Boston Globe editorial board, February 1, 2011
• Partial progress on justice reform, by Maureen Turner, Valley Advocate (W. Mass.) June 3, 2010
• “Urban Penalty: Do drug-free school zones unfairly target cities and people of color?”, by Maureen Turner, Valley Advocate (Western Massachusetts) February 26, 2009.
• “Mass. sentencing laws not doing the job” by St. John Barned-Smith, Bay State Banner (Boston, MA), February 19, 2009.
• “You’re Probably in a Drug-Free School Zone Right Now: For all the good it does”, by Chris Faraone, Boston Phoenix February 11, 2009.
• “Drug free zones facing review”, by Jo-Ann Moriarty, The Republican (Springfield, MA) July 26, 2008.