“If you treat federal law the way the secretary of state does, you go to prison.
If you treat IRS rules the way the IRS treats IRS rules, you go to prison
If you treat immigration controls the way our immigration authorities do, you go to prison.
If you’re as careless in your handling of firearms as the ATF is, you go to prison.
If you cook your business’s books the way the federal government cooks its books, you go to prison.”
Courtesy of some guy at Slashdot.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder have released many, many megabytes of recommendations and guidelines for improving school disciplinary systems. They recommend that schools use policies based on evidence and aligned with a goal of education, instead of the current policies, which are based on post-Columbine hysteria and a goal of maximizing punishment.
The “zero tolerance” nightmare has always been highly discriminatory towards the poor. The more money you have, the more effectively you can protect your children from the anti-educational cruelty that is the basis of modern US school discipline. When you combine this with the disproportionate number of people of color at lower income levels, and recognize similar inequities in the criminal justice system, the reason the school-to-prison pipeline principally victimizes non-white students is clear. The fact that rich people (who are mostly white) can dodge the absurdly extreme consequences of typical childish behaviors better than poor people (who mostly aren’t white) means that zero-tolerance policies, intended to be equally sadistic and harmful towards all children, are in practice part of a legacy of racism and color-line discrimination anywhere there is a significant non-white population. I’m going to be politically incorrect and say it’s nice to see people coming together to fight these horrible policies, though, and not merely their racist application and effects. Zero tolerance has to go now; the fifteen years we’ve had it have already sown an ill harvest – that we’ll reap for decades, if not centuries – and it’s going to hurt people of every race and color.
Effective discipline is, and always will be, a necessity. But a routine school discipline infraction should land a student in a principal’s office – not in a police precinct. — Eric Holder, 2014-01-08
The ACLU’s got a petition to end zero tolerance in Michigan up, go sign it. I’ll wait.
By all accounts Kyle Thompson is a normal 14-year old kid who loves playing football and hanging out with his friends. His principal says he’d love to have an entire school filled with students like Kyle.
And yet, after a misunderstanding with his teacher, Kyle was led from school in handcuffs, was expelled from all state public schools for a year, and is now spending the year under house arrest.
Kyle’s teacher wanted to see a note he had written, and when she playfully tried to take it from him, he tried to hold on to it. Even though all the witness statements said that the teacher was joking around and Kyle didn’t act aggressively, the incident ended with Kyle under arrest. He’s now represented by a criminal defense attorney.
Kyle’s lucky enough to have parents willing and able to spend the big bucks it takes to pry your kid out of the zero tolerance trap. The kids from poorer families, well, they’re gettin a different education – they’re being trained to be the next generation of prison inmates and career criminals.
Bruce Schneir linked this interesting essay, which points out that the ever-dropping crime rate is sort of fake. In reality, crime (particularly rape) is increasing, but not counting crimes committed within the prison system gives an illusory decrease. We’re sweeping it under the rug, where it can flourish and grow out of sight. This is particularly disturbing in light of the findings of Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, which confirmed Rudolf Diels’ observations about how certain kinds of work create and foster sadism, and Temple Grandin’s observations on the behavior of slaughterhouse workers. When we imprison people, we not only intentionally punish and degrade the prisoners, we also unintentionally degrade many of the people we’ve hired to staff the prisons.
“The infliction of physical punishment is not every man’s job, and naturally we were only too glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task. Unfortunately, we knew nothing about the Freudian side of the business, and it was only after a number of instances of unnecessary flogging and meaningless cruelty that I tumbled to the fact that my organization had been attracting all the sadists in Germany and Austria without my knowledge for some time past. It had also been attracting unconscious sadists, i.e. men who did not know themselves that they had sadist leanings until they took part in a flogging. And finally it had actually been creating sadists. For it seems that corporal chastisement ultimately arouses sadistic leanings in apparently normal men and women. Freud might explain it.” — Rudolf Diels, as quoted in Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts”.