Public School Students Are the New Inmates in the
American Police State
Guest Column By John Whitehead
Public School Students Are the New Inmates in the
American Police State
71 20 24
By John W. Whitehead
September 14, 2015
In the American police state, you’re either a prisoner
(shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and
say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (police officer, judge,
jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).
Indeed, at a time when we are all viewed as suspects,
there are so many ways in which a person can be branded a criminal for
violating any number of laws, regulations or policies. Even if you haven’t
knowingly violated any laws, there is still a myriad of ways in which you can
run afoul of the police state and end up on the wrong side of a jail cell.
Unfortunately, when you’re a child in the American
police state, life is that much worse.
Microcosms of the police state, America’s public
schools contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless,
overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that
plagues those of us on the “outside.”
From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment she graduates, she will be exposed
to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish
behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech, school
resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called
“disorderly” students, standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over
critical thinking, politically correct mindsets that teach young people to
censor themselves and those around them, and extensive biometric and
surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a
world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.
If your child is fortunate enough to survive his
encounter with the public schools, you should count yourself fortunate.
Most students are not so lucky.
For instance, a Virginia sixth grader, the son of two
school teachers and a member of the school’s gifted program, was suspended for
a year after school officials found a leaf (likely a maple leaf) in his
backpack that they suspected was marijuana. Despite the fact that the leaf in question was not
marijuana (a
fact that officials knew almost immediately), the 11-year-old was still kicked
out of school, charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court, enrolled in
an alternative school away from his friends, subjected to twice-daily searches
for drugs, and forced to be evaluated for substance abuse problems.
As the Washington Post warns: “It doesn’t matter if your son or daughter brings a
real pot leaf to school, or if he brings something that looks like a pot
leaf—okra, tomato, maple, buckeye, etc. If your kid calls it marijuana as a
joke, or if another kid thinks it might be marijuana, that's grounds for
expulsion.”
Many state laws require that schools notify law
enforcement whenever a student is found with an “imitation controlled
substance,” basically anything that look likes a drug but isn’t actually
illegal. As a result, students have been suspended for bringing to school
household spices such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar.
It’s not just look-alike drugs that can get a student
in trouble under school zero tolerance policies. Look-alike weapons (toy
guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and
arrows, even fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in
detention.
Acts of kindness, concern or basic manners can also
result in suspensions. One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the
school to “liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair
to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who wassuspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.
Unfortunately, while these may appear to be isolated
incidents, they are indicative of a nationwide phenomenon in which children are
treated like suspects and criminals, especially within the public schools.
The schools have become a microcosm of the American
police state, right down to the host of surveillance technologies, including
video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS
tracking devices, employed to keep constant watch over their student bodies.
Making matters worse are the police.
Students accused of being disorderly or noncompliant
have a difficult enough time navigating the bureaucracy of school boards, but
when you bring the police into the picture, after-school detention and visits
to the principal’s office are transformed into punishments such as misdemeanor
tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.
In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and more “stepping
in to deal with minor rulebreaking—sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical
skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to
the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary
blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.”
Thanks to a combination of media hype, political
pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers to patrol
school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school
shooting (nearly 20,000 by 2003). Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these
school resource officers (SROs) have become de facto wardens in the elementary,
middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called
“criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepperspray, batons and
brute force.
The horror stories are legion.
Now advocates for such harsh police tactics and
weaponry will tell you that school safety should be our first priority lest we
find ourselves with another Sandy Hook. What they will not tell you is that
such shootings are rare. As one congressional report found, the schools are,
generally speaking, safe places for children.
In their zeal to crack down on guns and lock down the
schools, these cheerleaders for police state tactics in the schools might also
fail to mention the lucrative, multi-million dollar deals being cut with military contractors such as
Taser International to equip these school cops with tasers, tanks, rifles and $100,000 shooting detection systems.
According to one law review article on the school-to-prison pipeline, “Many school
districts have formed their own police departments, some so large they rival
the forces of major United States cities in size. For example, the safety
division in New York City’s public schools is so large that if it were a local
police department, it would be the fifth-largest police force in the country.”
The ramifications are far-reaching.
The term “school-to-prison pipeline” refers to a
phenomenon in which children who are suspended or expelled from school have a
greater likelihood of ending up in jail. One study found that “being suspended
or expelled made a student nearlythree times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile justice
system within the next year.”
Not content to add police to their employee rosters,
the schools have also come to resemble prisons, complete with surveillance
cameras, metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, random locker searches and active
shooter drills. The Detroit public schools boast a “‘$5.6 million 23,000-sq ft.
state of the art Command Center’ and ‘$41.7 million district-wide security
initiative’ including metal detectors and ID system where visitors’ names are checked against the sex
offender registry.”
Private prisons, the largest among them being GEO and
the Corrections Corporation of America, profit by taking over a state’s prison
population for a fee. Many states, under contract with these private prisons, agree to keep the prisons full, which in turn results in more Americans being
arrested, found guilty and jailed for nonviolent “crimes” such as holding Bible
studies in their back yard. As the Washington Post points out, “With
the growing influence of the prison lobby, the nation is, in effect,
commoditizing human bodies for an industry in militant pursuit of profit… The
influence of private prisons creates a system that trades money for human
freedom, often
at the expense of the nation’s most vulnerable populations: children,
immigrants and the poor.”
This profit-driven system of incarceration has also
given rise to a growth in juvenile prisons and financial incentives for jailing
young people. Indeed, young people have become easy targets for the private
prison industry, which profits from criminalizing childish behavior and jailing
young people. For instance, two Pennsylvania judges made headlines when it was
revealed that they had been conspiring with two businessmen in a $2.6 million
“kids for cash” scandal that resulted in more than 2500 children being found
guilty and jailed in for-profit private prisons.
It has been said that America’s schools are the
training ground for future generations. Instead of raising up a generation of
freedom fighters, however, we seem to be busy churning out newly minted
citizens of the American police state who are being taught the hard way what it
means to comply, fear and march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the
American People, with
every school police raid and overzealous punishment that is carried out in the
name of school safety, the lesson being imparted is that Americans—especially
young people—have no rights at all against the state or the police.
I’ll conclude with one hopeful anecdote about a
Philadelphia school dubbed the “Jones Jail” because of its bad reputation for
violence among the student body. Situated in a desperately poor and dangerous
part of the city, the John Paul Jones Middle School’s student body had grown up
among drug users, drug peddlers, prostitutes and gun violence. “By middle
school,” reports The Atlantic, most of these students “have
witnessed more violence than most Americans who didn't serve in a war ever
will.”
According to investigative reporters Jeff Deeney,
“School police officers patrolled the building at John Paul Jones, andchildren were routinely submitted to
scans with
metal detecting wands. All the windows were covered in metal grating and one
room that held computers even had thick iron prison bars on its exterior… Every
day… [police] would set up a perimeter of police officers on the blocks around
the school, and those police were there to protect neighbors from the children,
not to protect the children from the neighborhood.”
In other words, John Paul Jones, one of the city’s
most dangerous schools, was a perfect example of the school-to-prison, police
state apparatus at work among the nation’s youngest and most impressionable
citizens.
When management of John Paul Jones was taken over by a
charter school that opted to de-escalate the police state presence, stripping
away the metal detectors and barred windows, local police protested. In fact, they showed up wearing Kevlar vests. Nevertheless, school officials remained determined
to do away with institutional control and surveillance, as well as aggressive
security guards, and focus on noncoercive, nonviolent conflict resolution with
an emphasis on student empowerment, relationship building and anger management.
The result: a 90% drop in serious incidents—drug sales, weapons, assaults, rapes—in one year
alone. As one fifth-grader remarked on the changes, “There are no more fights.
There are no more police. That's better for the community.”
The lesson for the rest of us is this: you not only
get what you pay for, but you reap what you sow.
If you want a nation of criminals, treat the citizenry
like criminals.
If you want young people who grow up seeing themselves
as prisoners, run the schools like prisons.
But if you want to raise up a generation of freedom
fighters, who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability and
equality towards each other and their government, then run the schools like
freedom forums. Remove the metal detectors and surveillance cameras, re-assign
the cops elsewhere, and start treating our nation’s young people like citizens
of a republic and not inmates in a police state.
WC: 2333
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