Drug-Free Zone Laws at Scale: Counterfactual Zone Reforms for Policy Design and Evaluation

• In Event: Racial Disparities in Criminal Justice Decision-Making: Sentencing, Courts, and Policy Design

Abstract

Drug-free zones (DFZs) are geographically defined sentencing enhancements for drug offenses. First introduced in the 1970s to deter illicit activity near schools, they have since expanded far beyond their original scope. Today, DFZ laws impose additional penalties for drug offenses occurring within fixed distances of schools, parks, public housing, places of worship, and other designated sites. They often apply even if the offenses occur inside private homes. DFZ statutes vary dramatically across states in scale, covered enforcement location categories, zone radius, and attached penalties. Empirical research consistently finds little evidence that these laws reduce drug use or meaningfully protect minors. Yet they remain a durable feature of state criminal codes.
Our prior national work shows that Black, Asian, and Latinx residents are disproportionately likely to live within DFZ boundaries, making statutory geography a mechanism through which racialized punishment is intensified. With federal criminal-justice leadership receding, whether and how this disparity is reformed now rests with state legislatures.
Our goal is to develop a state-specific “playbook” that identifies which targeted amendments would most effectively reduce racial disparities while remaining legislatively plausible. To do so, we propose two core policy modifications: (1) eliminating one or more enforcement location categories, and (2) reducing existing zone radii, and assess which modifications most substantially reduce racial disparity in DFZ exposure.
We integrate parsed state DFZ statutes, state-specific geocoded covered locations lists (schools, parks, public housing, places of worship, child-care, etc.), and census block-level demographics to compute, for every block, whether it falls inside a DFZ. We then run two families of counterfactual simulations: (1) removing each category of enforcement location, and (2) incrementally shrinking the zone radius. For each counterfactual, we recompute in-zone population by race and quantify changes in total exposure and relative racial overrepresentation.
In Miami-Dade County, for example, removing places of worship from the enforcement location category list produces the largest reduction in Black overrepresentation, while uniformly shrinking radii substantially reduces Latinx exposure but worsens Black overrepresentation—revealing a tradeoff between minimizing total exposure and minimizing relative disparity. However, this pattern does not generalize cleanly statewide. Across Florida, no single category removal consistently reduces racial disparities, and Black overrepresentation remains persistent across most counterfactuals even as overall exposure declines. The equity impacts of reform vary substantially across geographies, reflecting differences in demographic composition and spatial distribution of covered locations. As a result, no single statutory change is universally optimal, even within one state.
DFZ laws are a paradigmatic case of state policy variation producing uneven well-being outcomes. Exposure isn’t a perfect stand-in for sentencing outcomes; enforcement and prosecutorial discretion shape what actually happens on the ground. But exposure is what the statute directly determines, making it the most appropriate lever for reform analysis. While we have focused on Florida, we are extending this framework to a nationwide analysis to examine how optimal, equity-improving reforms vary across state legal regimes and demographic geographies. Scaling these simulations across states offers policymakers jurisdiction-specific pathways for reducing racial disparity within state-specific constraints.

Authors

• Andrew D Zaharia, Campaign Zero
  Presenting Author

• Elijah Salisbury, Campaign Zero
  Non-Presenting Co-Author