For 27 years, Connecticut's harsh drug-free zone law has punished minorities more severely than white people for the same crimes and has failed to protect urban children, David McGuire, staff attorney for the ACLU of Connecticut, told the state legislature's Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
He testified in support of Senate Bill 259, which would shrink drug-free zones from 1,500 to 300 feet from any school, public housing complex or day care center.
"Just to put it in perspective, the 1,500 feet that this bill covers is a quarter-mile radius," McGuire said. "Only seven states have this large of a drug zone."
Under the existing law, almost the entire cities of Bridgeport and Hartford are within drug-free zones and the Yale golf course is the only part of New Haven outside one. The zones are far smaller in suburban and rural communities. Because African American and Latino people are far more likely than white people to live within drug-free zones, they are automatically subjected to harsher penalties for the same crimes.
The original intent of the law was to protect children from drug trafficking by enhancing the penalties for such crimes in places where children are likely to congregate. But McGuire noted that when an entire city is a drug-free zone, without differentiation, there can be no deterrent effect. If the law offers any protection at all, it’s only in suburbs and rural towns, not in the cities where most minority children live.
This double dose of racial discrimination is one of the reasons Delaware and Massachusetts have reduced the radius of their drug free zones in recent years and why the non-partisan Connecticut Sentencing Commission has recommended for the second year in a row that Connecticut do the same. Last year a similar bill died on the floor of the state House of Representatives when opponents labeled the measure "soft on crime" and support began to waver after a long, eleventh-hour debate.
McGuire urged legislators to pass the bill this year. "It’s not about being tough or soft on crime," he said. "It’s about being fair."
In addition to the ACLU of Connecticut and the Connecticut Sentencing Commission, the bill was supported by the Connecticut Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, A Better Way Foundation, the Office of Chief Public Defender, the Prison Policy Initiative, UConn Students for Sensible Drug Policy and the Unitarian Universalist Society.
The colored areas of these maps show the drug-free zones in Hartford and Canaan, according to a 2005 report from the Legislative Program Review and Investigations Committee.
