New Jersey Criminal Defense Blog

This recent report in NJ.com claims that twenty percent of New Jersey’s total prison population, around 5,596 state prison inmates, consists of inmates serving a mandatory minimum sentence for a drug offense in New Jersey of some kind. While other states have relaxed sentencing for drug crimes to save money on incarceration and alleviate some of the overcrowding in prisons across the country from imprisoning minor drug offenders, New Jersey lawmakers have resisted similar legislation. Critics of mandatory drug sentencing claim that decades of inflexible drug sentencing laws have proven to be ineffective at deterring drug use and drug crimes, lead to dangerously overcrowded prison conditions, cost taxpayers a steadily increasing amount of money each year and unfairly target minorities.

In recent years, many states across the country have eliminated mandatory minimum drug sentencing for some types of drug crimes, but similar measures in New Jersey, which would save taxpayers millions of dollars annually on incarceration costs, have been held up for the past year. In April, the State of New York, one of the earliest adopters of mandatory minimums for drug sentencing known as the “Rockefeller laws,” repealed some of the stricter sentencing guidelines of that legislation.

New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine, the Attorney General, New Jersey prison officials and prosecutors have backed a measure that would reduce drug-free school zones to 200 feet. But Bruce Stout, a former member of a New Jersey State Commission to Review Criminal Sentencing said that the measure “hit the wall at 90 miles an hour and imploded.” Under the current law, anyone convicted of drug possession within 1,000 feet of a school must receive a mandatory minimum of three years in state prison; one year imprisonment for possession of no more than an ounce of marijuana. According to the commission, 96 percent of all people imprisoned for violations in drug-free school zones are either African-American or Latino.