Les Jones

News > Zero Intelligence

Zero tolerance gone awry. Via Michael Silence.

HOUSTON – Unaware it had turned cool overnight, Eddie Evans's 12-year-old son bolted out of the house in shirt sleeves. He was on his way to the bus stop when his mother called him back for a jacket.

In third period the boy discovered that the three-inch pocketknife he had taken to his last Boy Scout meeting was still inside his coat - a definite no-no under the school's zero-tolerance policy. Unsure what to do, he consulted a friend before putting the knife in his locker. The friend turned him in and, after lunch, police arrested him and took him to a juvenile-detention center without contacting his parents, according to Senate testimony.

I'm an advocate of schools calling police when a law is broken, rather than having the school play the part of police, judge, and jury. Schools typically don't do a good job at either law enforcement or ensuring a student's constitutional rights.

In this case, though, I can't understand why the police were involved. The student broke a school policy, but it's not clear from the article that he broke the law, and it isn't at all evident he was a danger. The over-reaction by the administration (45 days expulsion) was a hoplophobic over-reaction.

Defenders of the zero-tolerance approach say that, whatever its flaws, it at least brings a measure of equality to punishment: A child at a posh suburban school in theory faces the same consequences for "bad behavior" as does a student from a more chaotic or disadvantaged environment.

Fairness is a desirable goal of a system, but it's not the highest goal. In the case of punishment, having punishments that are proportional to the crime seems like a better goal. Anyway, it seems like systems that try to maximize fairness between groups often do a poor job at being fair to individuals.