Zero tolerance for student safety or to control them?
By Pierre Tristam
Created May 13 2008 - 9:40am
Massacre. Suicide-bombing. Mass murder. Conspiracy. WMDs. They love those
inflammatory words, don't they? Not just adolescents, who use the words as
adolescents would, without gauging their impact, but also law enforcement
types, who should know better. The climate that makes chatter of school
shootings so endemic can be attributed to the few deranged souls who think
up mayhem fantasies in their miserable little journals and cyber-caves.
But
they're not the only ones responsible.
"Massacre" and "conspiracy to commit murder" were the words (and official
charges) of choice when three DeLand Middle School seventh-graders were
arrested in March after their "plot" to gun down other students and
themselves was uncovered. "The investigators determined the students did
not
appear to have weapons or means to carry out the threats," a Volusia
County
Sheriff's spokesman said soon after their arrest. Nevertheless, word of a
massacre averted and severe punishment deserved spread through the
community. The three children's grind through the system is only
beginning.
What, so far as we know, had these children done? One of them posted
threatening messages and satanic idiocies on his MySpace page, along with
the obligatory references to the Columbine school massacre. No matter how
baseless, those references have become iconic for anyone angling for his
15
minutes of fearsome fame. Innumerable journal entries by seething
adolescents, in print and online, are no doubt filled with Columbine
fantasies. They're ignored, as adolescent scrawls generally (or absent
more
incriminating evidence) should be regardless of medium. Once in a while
they're "uncovered." What should be the occasion for a parent-child
reality
check, a dressing down or at most a trip to the local counselor, is turned
over to law enforcement instead. The cycle of public fear and
sensationalism
kicks in. For the children in question, humiliation and cruelty (what any
form of juvenile-criminal proceedings and detention consist of these days)
follow.
There's been a spate of alleged plots in schools lately, locally and
elsewhere. Spring is the season of threats. It's stupid students' way of
commemorating the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres, which took place
April 20, 1999 and April 16, 2007, claiming 47 lives between them (the
three
gunmen included). Earlier this month two schools in New Smyrna Beach
swirled
with rumors of an attack. Since April, Malcolm X College and St. Xavier
University in Chicago, Oakland University in Auburn Hills, Mich., and
three
parochial schools in Michigan all closed when threats scribbled their way
around each campus. Tales of suspicious backpacks, rumors endowed with the
power of errant bullets and bad jokes elevated to threat levels worthy of
the Department of Homeland Security's paranoia locked down or shut down
schools in Oveido, Pittsburgh and South Bend.
And police in Chesterfield County, S.C., in what's becoming a habit of
pre-emptive arrests based on private thoughts rather than action, arrested
a
high school senior who'd been writing threatening messages in his journal
for up to a year. He'd referred to an alleged suicide-bombing plot against
his own high school as "Columbine III." The boy's parents tipped off
police
in that one. The boy was charged, if you can believe this, with attempting
to use a weapon of mass destruction.
What almost all these allegations have in common is dispro****tion -- the
dispro****tionate fantasies of the alleged perpetrators, whose frames of
reference are cribbed from a culture that blurs the lines between video
games, entertainment, celebrity and violence; and the dispro****tionate
response from schools and law enforcement, whose overzealous narratives
incite fear by feeding into overheated anxieties. But there's glamour in
the
language of violence and humiliation. Witness the Daytona Beach police
chief's fetish for the word "scumbag," now emblazoned (as "scumbag
eradication team") with an obscene image on ****rts for the teenagers in
the
department's Police Explorer program. There's power in the language of
violence supposedly averted, even if the upshot of it all is more
irrational
fear, not more security, and more children slammed into a juvenile-justice
system designed to scare and punish, not heal and reintegrate.
We live, it's true, in one of the most violent states in the most violent
society of the developed world, the most crime-ridden, the most
prison-happy
(2.3 million people behind bars and rising). Schools might reflect their
world. But sensational incidents aside, schools remain among the safest
quasi-public spaces anywhere -- not because they've been turned into
fortresses of discipline and order, which they have, but because schools
are
simply not useful to criminals. Rather, they're being made too useful to
the
policing mentality of zero-tolerance discipline, perpetual surveillance
and
unquestioned authority that mirrors a larger transformation of society.
Security is the excuse. But obedience to authority has little to do with
security, and everything to do with control. Schools in this bogus age of
terror are the cheapest, most impressionable, most unquestioning
incubators
of mass submission.
_______
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NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues.
I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an op****tunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are
at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
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