Anyone with school age children, or anyone who has been in high school or college in the past fifteen or so years, is familiar with the concept of “Zero Tolerance” polices. Such policies provide that certain behaviors—fighting, getting caught with drugs, etc.—will not be tolerated and result in an automatic, one-size-fits-all, punishment. Mistake, lack of intent, ignorance of such policies, or any extenuating circumstances are, under “Zero Tolerance” policies, irrelevant.
If you get caught with drugs because you wore your brother’s jacket to school and he had a joint stashed in the liner, you get the same punishment as the student who intentionally brings 3 grams of heroin to school to sell. Drugs are drugs, says the Zero Tolerance policy, and drugs will not be tolerated on campus, period.
Nationwide, about 80 percent of school districts are estimated to have zero tolerance policies. (Jenny LaCoste, Pensacola News Journal, Sept. 29; Bill Kaczor, “Pensacola honor students win zero tolerance drug ruling”, AP/Bradenton Herald, Sept. 27). To be blunt, that means 80% of schools are woefully inept at understanding children and criminal behavior.
Tough (Or Stupid?) On Crime
“Zero Tolerance” policies are a misguided effort by schools and universities to appear “tough on crime.” Instead, the practical effect of such policies at schools is to create what has been termed the “school to prison pipeline.”
The presence of police officers in schools has led to the criminalization of minor infractions (graffiti, fighting, and such) that should properly be handled within the institutional framework of the school. Additionally, the presence of police in schools in general suggests to children that they are criminals who need to be policed. What sort of message is this?
Students who commit minor infractions are funneled from the educational system into the criminal justice system (juvenile courts, namely.) I have attended numerous Code of Conduct hearings where I have heard school officials say that a certain student is being expelled because their behavior was not conducive to education. Apparently, the irony of this is lost on them: how is expelling the student conducive to the student’s education? They miss school to attend juvenile court, and are funneled into county supervision (probation) departments where they become part of a criminal system. Children belong in schools, not in prisons.
Failure to Address Causative Factors of Crime & Willful Blindness
“Zero Tolerance” policies ignore economic disparity and lack of social opportunities that create and influence criminal behavior. In this way, zero tolerance policies are not only lazy (punishment A is doled out every time offense B is committed, without exception or thought), they are insidious.
Such willful blindness to economic disparity and the lack or loss of social opportunities fails to address the underlying causative factors of criminal behavior (namely, economic disparity and lack/loss of social opportunity.) If, for example, 9 out of 10 children punished for possessing drugs at school come from economically depressed backgrounds, “zero tolerance” policies are blind to this critical and potentially useful factor. Because such a factor would be considered an extenuating circumstance would be determined to be irrelevant towards punishment (insofar as “zero tolerance” punishes irrespective of economic status), patterns that underlie potential criminality are ignored. Crime thus continues, precisely because the motivating factors behind it remain shrouded.
In this way, the blindness of “zero tolerance” policies does not subvert such factors, but instead reify the framework of the very factors such policies are blind to: poor people are more likely to possess drugs at school; children who possess drugs at school are expelled; the loss of an education leads to further poverty; and so on.
Race and “Zero Tolerance” Policies
Champions of “zero tolerance” policies will suggest that by uniformly applying a prescribed punishment to all instances of a given offense, punishment is applied irrespective of race. They will suggest that, because everyone caught with drugs is expelled, the race of the alleged offender is of no consequence—white or black, everyone gets expelled.
This is patently untrue. In reality, such policies have vastly disproportionate effects on minorities, particularly on black students. The ACLU reports that black students account for 16% of the population of students enrolled in public schools, and 42% of students expelled from public schools. Black students account for 31% of school-related arrests, and are suspended/expelled three times more often than white students. See: American Bar Association, “Schools Start to Rethink Zero Tolerance Policies,” published on-line August 1, 2014 at http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/schools_start_to_rethink_zero_tolerance_policies/, writing that “[i]n Chicago, for example, while blacks make up 41.3 percent of the city’s public school students, they account for 71 percent of expelled students”; and countless American Bar Association, ACLU, and Department of Education investigations and papers beginning in the 1980’s have addressed the racial disparity in application of “Zero Tolerance” policies.) Yet, the impact on black students remains ignored by school officials, juvenile courts, and policy makers.
Effacing the Individual
At its most vicious, “Zero Tolerance” policies efface the concept of “individual” and instead embrace and exalt the “crime” itself. If such policies care nothing for the race, socioeconomic background, family history, the existence of learning disabilities or mental disorders, or any detail related to the accused student—if they “blindly punish”—the message sent is that the individual has little or no value. Instead, the criminal act, receives attention. Put simply, if any student who fights at school is expelled, we care nothing about the student who has fought, but only about the conduct of fighting. The criminal act becomes the focus of “Zero Tolerance” policies.
I am not a psychologist, so I cannot speak to what the effect of obliterating a young person’s sense of self (of being an individual) is. However, it goes without saying that the effect must be dire. What message does the child receive if no one asks about the child, but only about the child’s criminal behavior? That the criminal behavior is the child? Or worse, that the criminal behavior is more important than the child? When we tell children they don’t matter, we cannot be surprised when they act out.