This study reviewed the role of a law providing enhanced penalties for drug dealing within 1,000 feet of a school in 443 drug-dealing cases in three cities in Massachusetts: Fall River, New Bedford, and Springfield. We reviewed district attorneys' case files and mapped drug-dealing incidents using a combination of geographic information systems and location visits with a hand-held geographic positioning system. School zones -the areas within 1,000 feet of schoolscover 29% of the areas of the study cities and 56% of the high-poverty areas within the cities. Although less than 1% of the drug-dealing cases involved sales to minors, approximately 80% of the cases occurred within school zones, apparently because of the density of schools in high-poverty/high-drug-dealing areas. Most school zone cases are "broken down" -defendants plead to lesser charges and receive less than the two-year mandatory minimum sentence for dealing in a school zone. Decisions to "break down" charges are not influenced by proximity to schools or time of day. Most drug dealers commit their offenses close to home, and most dealers charged with dealing in school zones reside in school zones. Overlapping school zone boundaries are chaotic and confusing in the inner city areas studied. The school zone statute fails to push drug dealing away from schools: the density of dealing within 250 feet of schools is similar to the density of dealing at greater distances.

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In principle any therapeutic technique can and should be subjected to a formal statistical trial. Those patients helped and those patients harmed should be counted. Only if the first number significantly exceeds the second should the treatment be retained. In practice, remarkable difficulties supervene. Abundant consideration has been given in the past to the problems of defining psychotherapy, of defining improvement, and of achieving reliability among judges to identify improvement. The abstracting effect of the common statistical techniques, however, has been less commonly recognized as a problem. Presented here is a mathematical model of a controlled statistical trial of psychotherapy. It illustrates how accurate clinical perceptions about individuals and valid statistics about groups may provide apparently conflicting evidence regarding the effectiveness of psychotherapy.

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