by: Lauren Gailey, Op-Ed Participant
“The punishment should fit the crime.” This notion, proportionality, is one of the most important principles underlying the American conception of justice. Nevertheless, public schools around the nation, confronted with such frightening issues as gun violence, other violent crime, and drug abuse, have responded by instituting “zero tolerance” policies. These policies, which impose harsh punishments for the slightest infractions, raise the question whether proportionality has, to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, been shed at the schoolhouse gate.
Consider just a few:
In March 2014, a Columbus-area fifth grader was suspended for three days for forming his finger into the shape of a gun and pointing it “execution-style” at a classmate’s head.
The same month, a Virginia sixth grader received a 10-day suspension with a recommendation for expulsion for possessing a weapon after she took a razorblade from a classmate who was cutting himself and threw it away.
In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that school administrators violated a 13-year-old student’s constitutional rights when they strip-searched her after suspecting that she had hidden ibuprofen—the equivalent of two Advil tablets—in her underwear.
Closer to home, a Fox Chapel High School student was suspended for 10 days in 2013 when he turned a pocketknife he had accidentally brought to a football game in his coat pocket over to school authorities.
A simple internet search will inevitably turn up dozens more stories just like these, in which the harsh punishments school administrators mete out for seemingly minor infractions—many resulting from typical childhood pranks and horseplay—are so disproportionate and divorced from common sense that they rise to the level of absurdity.
It was not always this way. The Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 required schools to adopt a “zero tolerance” approach toward students bringing guns to school—an indisputably severe offense. Ever since, schools have expanded the reach of these policies to include less egregious conduct. These crackdowns are often instituted as direct reactions to national tragedies such as the massacres at Columbine High School in 1999 and Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. The public outcry in response to these events helps to explain why such disproportionality seemed justifiable at the time in the eyes of school administrators.
Unfortunately, the reactive nature of zero tolerance is its fatal flaw. In the wake of a tragedy, a measured response by school administrators becomes all but impossible. At the same time, however, zero tolerance policies have not proven to be effective deterrents. As Sandy Hook made painfully clear, mass shootings still occur with alarming frequency. Other types of violent crime and illicit drug use also remain all too common among schoolchildren. These realities make clear that zero tolerance policies punish only a few tiny snowflakes resting harmlessly atop the proverbial iceberg.
What they do punish, however, is imaginative play (in the case of the “finger gun”), common sense (carrying ibuprofen to school), caring for others (throwing away the razor blades), and honesty (turning in the pocketknife). The severe punishments they impose take children away from their studies, risk doing permanent harm to their futures, and may even expose them to the whims of the juvenile justice system. They also encourage students to attempt to evade punishment by sneaking, lying, and obscuring the truth from school administrators. As the Fox Chapel incident made clear, a student facing zero tolerance has no incentive to admit an innocent misstep. What does this teach children about accepting responsibility for and learning from their mistakes?
Zero tolerance policies are, by definition, disproportionate and unreasonable: they rule out common sense. Society would be better served by carefully identifying the root causes of the problems of gun violence, drug abuse, and crime among our youth, and formulating laws and policies that actually have some hope of solving them. Imposing wildly disproportionate punishments upon students for innocent behavior that merely bears a resemblance to these problems solves nothing. The time has come to rethink zero tolerance and replace it with reasonable and fair punishments for harmless youthful indiscretions.
America’s public schools do more than just educate their students. They also instill values, and common sense, reasonableness and prudence should be among them. Because their disciplinary measures have the potential to guide students’ vision of what is and is not acceptable behavior, schools must set the right example. They must practice proportionality, not just teach it in social studies classes. Punishment that fits the crime—one of our justice system’s fundamental building blocks—must not stop at the schoolhouse gate.
