Letter to the editor published in the Boston Herald on February 4, 2011.<\/p>\n
Your editorial on the governor\u2019s sentencing bill (\u201cGoing soft on crime,\u201d Jan. 28) notes that when it comes to the school zone law, \u201cin a city like Boston it\u2019s pretty hard not to be within 1,000 feet on a school.\u201d As a researcher who has studied the state\u2019s school zone law, I agree. And that\u2019s the problem.<\/p>\n
The 1,000 foot distance is itself a flaw. That distance\u2014 greater than the length of three football fields\u2014 has created school zones so large that few people know the boundaries. Which means that the zones don\u2019t drive drug activity away from children, as intended.<\/p>\n
The governor\u2019s bill would reduce school zones to 100 feet of a school or its property, which is the same size as the drug-free zones drawn around parks and playgrounds. A tightly drawn drug-free zone has a greater deterrent effect. His bill also keeps the mandatory minimum stench for school zone offenses and retains two other vital laws that requite mandatory sentences for selling drugs to minors or using them in drug transactions. The governor\u2019s proposal is not soft on crime. It\u2019s smart.<\/p>\n
Peter Wagner,
\nExecutive Director
\nPrison Policy Initiative
\nNorthampton<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Letter to the editor of the Boston Herald in response to \u201cGoing soft on crime,\u201d published Jan. 28 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"coauthors":[11],"class_list":["post-1960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-zones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1960"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}