Drugs & Discrimination
There’s an interesting article over at the NYTimes called Drugs and Racial Discrimination which deals with the zero-tolerance “drug free zone” laws established to protect schools from the influence of illegal narcotics by proscribing harsh penalties for anyone found within 1000 feet of school property and in possession of an illegal substance. Nevermind that the 1000 foot radius is mathematically annoying, not just because the school property cannot be approximated as a point, but because by standard walking distance you might actually be well over 1000 feet away, but still inside the radius.
No, the real issue is school district density. Because there are more schools in urban than suburban settings, and minorities tend to llive in the denser parts of the city, while white people flock to the suburbs, the vast majority of cases prosecuted under these harsh no-tolerance drug laws are against minority defendants:
As a consequence, the report found, just about every offender incarcerated for a drug-free-zone offense in New Jersey is either black or Hispanic, even though those two groups make up only about a quarter of the population. Not a single one of the offenders had sold drugs to a minor, and fewer than 2 percent had actually committed offenses on school property.
In other words, because Blacks and Hispanics tend to live closer to schools than Whites, they receive harsher penalties, and all in the pathetic pretense of pretending our children. Why not actually just apply the same penalties to everyone, regardless of the location of the offense? Or, another solution, as mentioned by the NY Times article, is to allow judges discretion in sentencing these drug violations. As Aristotle said, “To distinguish the voluntary and the involuntary is presumably necessary for those who are studying the nature of virtue, and useful also for legislators with a view to the assigning both of honours and of punishments” (Nicomachean Ethics III).
| This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2006 at 9:51 pm and is tagged with ny times article, drug free zone, illegal narcotics, foot radius, zone offense, racial discrimination, suburban settings, harsh penalties, illegal substance, zero tolerance, pretense, punishments, single one, hispanics, nevermind, aristotle, honours, walking distance, legislators, flock. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
I first became aware of this nifty piece of law when I lived in Oakland California and was subjected to a brutal drug raid due to a nasty landlord situation. Tho I had very little of prosecutorial value, they tried to slap me with everything they could think of and when one of the young rookie cops looked out my front window and noticed a primary school across the road he could hardly contain his excitement as he got to book me on another charge. It was beyond ridiculous. I had absolutely no contact with the school other than being a neighbour and am quite sure that they were far more traumatized by seeing the nice lady across the street get hauled away by cops, along with a bunch of house plants (?) than they ever would have been had I been left alone to mind my own business!
Hi,
We don’t have this piece of draconian legislation in the UK – yet. And it’s our experience that a) Kids tend not to take drugs to school if they use them, it’s just too public and b) dealers don’t deal near schools – same reason. So to introduce something like this would be a pointless piece of law resulting in precisely the problem you cite for our minority communities.
Nice piece