Does the Punishment Fit the Crime? The Impact of Zero Tolerance Discipline on At-Risk Youths

Abstract

I n response to disastrous, yet relatively rare, instances of deadly school violence. Congress, in 1994, passed the Gun-Free Schools Act (GFSA) ,The GFSA mandated that each state pass legislation that requires a one-year expulsion for any student who brings a firearm to school for schools to be eligible to receive certain federal education funding. This legislation resulted in the implementation of zero tolerance policies and practices in the vast majority of U,S, public schools over the past decade (Fenning & Bohanon, 2006; Skiba & Rausch, 2006), By the 1996-97 school year, 94 percent of U,S, public schools had zero tolerance policies for ftrearms, 91 percent for other weapons, 88 percent for drugs, and 87 percent for alcohol (Kaufman et al,, 2000), What impact has this increasing use of zero tolerance discipline policies had on our most vulnerable, at-risk groups of students? The pervasive impact of zero tolerance discipline pohcies and practices in today's U,S, public schools cannot be overstated,This tough and swift one-size-fits-all punishment has resulted in a near epidemic of out-of-school suspensions. Zero tolerance discipline policies disproportionately affect African American and Hispanic students, who are suspended at approximately three times the rate of white students (Fenning & Bohanon, 2006; Rausch & Skiba, 2004), These discipline policies have also resulted in alarming numbers of students being referred to law enforcement and being arrested for minor skirmishes,A striking example recently occurred in Chicago, when 25 students, ages 11 to 15,wereroundedup, arrested, taken from school and put in for engaging in a food fight (Saulny, 2009, p, A18), In the nottoo-distant past, situations such as these would have been handled by school officials, often leading to a detention or parent conference,The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan (2009) recently issued a report titled Reclaiming Michigan's Throwaway Kids: Students Trapped in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, which documents and analyzes data that sho-w ho-w the frequent use of suspensions and expulsions disproportionately affects African American students and contributes to their dropping out of school and how these increasingly severe disciplinary policies criminalize student behavior and place students on a high-risk path to incarceration. For example, on any given day, nearly one in 10 young male high school dropouts and one in four African American dropouts is either in jail or in juvenile detention (Giroux, 2009), Zero tolerance discipline policies are antithetical to social work values and a democratic society and harm a significant number of young people (Dupper, 2010),There used to be a time when discipline in schools involved listening, exploring underlying issues, and deciding on a disciplinary response that was connected to the nature of the offense. Today, reason and judgment have been replaced with discipline practices that criminalize student behavior and create a school culture of fear and social control (Giroux, 2009), The cumulative impact of zero tolerance discipline policies is often insidious. For example, most would agree that students should be excluded from school for dangerous behaviors that pose a risk to others. However, there is evidence that out-of-school suspensions are not limited to only the most serious and dangerous student