THE PUNITIVE SOCIETY--How Criminalizing Childhood Reflects Harsh New Reality
A recent NEW YORK TIMES article by BOB HERBERT, SCHOOL TO PRISON PIPELINE, examined a growing but under reported phenomena plaguing the country-the criminalization of childhood.
I have been alarmed for some time by the trend to call the cops over what was once considered either trivial childhood mischief, an ordinary part of a sometimes rough and tumble march to maturity, or-even if viewed more seriously-considered the province of school, family and maybe church to adjust.
Examples of this trend have become almost too numerous to mention and are routinely reported in our daily press as if they were the most natural thing in the world. You know the kind of thing. A third grader forgets a Cub Scout knife left in the bottom of his back pack after a campout and is expelled from school and charged with possession of a “deadly weapon” on school grounds. Cheerleaders T.P. the house of the football coach the night before homecoming and are charged with multiple infractions ranging from malicious mischief to criminal trespass. A minor school yard scuffle results in the acknowledged instigator and the student who defended himself both being charged with assault.
Some instances, like the recent like the recent case of Cary Grove High School student Allen W. Lee (see my earlier entry HOME GROWN LUNACY--How the NORTHWEST HERALD Abets a Social Panic) create a momentary ripple in the national press. Most often these involve some First Amendment issue like a student arrested for wearing a forbidden t-shirt mocking the President, or-if you really want to see the hornets nest stirred up-students charged with circulating religious flyers on school property.
Many instances never draw any attention or public critisism at all. My grandson NICK discovered last fall that he could be arrested and charged with possesion of smoking materials (a lighter and the stub of a half smoked cigaret) even though he had not smoked on school property.
The defenders of this nonsence repeat the same mantras, often word for word, when asked about such policies in the press. “Times have changed,” we are told “We can’t allow any disruption to the educational environment.” Zero tolerence policies are often cited as if they were handed down by Moses from Mt. Sinai and not enacted by nervous school boards at the direction of hand-wringing lawyers. Thus no independent assesment on a case by case basis can be made and the kid with a ruber knife tucked in the sash of his pirate halloween constume is treated no differently than the known gang banger with a Glok under his coat; the girl with a medicated throat lozenge in her purse gets equal treatment with the kid with the baggie full of ‘ludes.
Not that these apparent injustices draw much public outrage. On the contrary, the letters to the editor are apt to be filled with vitriolic abuse for the students who challenge the fairness of such cases or the parents that come to their deffensce. They should “shut up and take responcibility.” Above all they must be “held accountable for their actions.”
Ah, that phrase “held accountable!” It has become the mantra of THE PUNITIVE SOCIETY. It is not just confined to schools, although its affects on the vulnerable may be more outrageous there. It has permiated our entire society. Everywhere from the smallest village to the mighty Federal Government behavior of every sort is regularly criminalized. The urge to punish those at the slightest variance from normative behavior seems universal. Once trivial offences are transformed into fellonies. Nominal fines a jacked to astronomical levels as officials sollemnly avow the intent to deter behavior for the public good and safety so that a single mother with an improperly installed child safety seat caught in a special “wolf pack” sweep may face fines equal to half a month’s income. Newpaper editorialists cheer.
Victimless crimes-individual drug use, prostitution, gambling, ect.-draw ever harsher sentences in the “War Against Drugs,” which is going just about as well as the “War on Terror.” Fellonies of every stripe-except those committed by latter-day robber barons and adminsitration officials-are subject to ever longer, more draconian sentences often with no possibilty of early release under so called “truth in sentenciing laws” and Federal mandatory sentencing guidelines. We have become the most prison happy country on earth. Only China holds more (usually for shorter sentences) and it is debatable of any nation holds such a huge percentage of the population in prison.
Despite rising awareness that the death penelty is unevenly applied to people of color and the poor, despite proof positive that many on death row are in fact totally inocent of the crimes with which they are charged, both the Federal Goverenment and several states have recently extended or attempted to extend the casses eligible for the ultimate penelty, including whole clasifications of cases in which the crime did not include the death of a victim.
Yet the conservative talking heads continue to natter on about how we are “soft on crime” and whine about “bleeding heart” judges. Apparently nothing short of mass public excecutions will slake their thirst for “justice.”
How to account for this state of affairs after more than a century of steady progress in the humane and rational treatment of prisoners from the Quaker and Universalist prison reformers of the 18th and 19th Centuries, throught the creation of juvinile courts and detention facilities, on to the end of the death sentence by Supreme Court decision? Certainly it had its roots in the crime wave of the early ‘70’s when the cresting Baby Boomer population provided lots of youth apt to go astray, cheap drugs flooded the streets, and the collapse of industrial America left big cities hell holes of unemploymnet and hopelessness. RONALD REAGAN rode to power on a public yearning for “order,” a lesson the Republican party never forgot. There after they were always stumbling all over each other to out do themselves on “toughness.”
But there was more to it than that. The history of the nation is repleat with periods of wide spread lawlessness followed by restorations, more or less, of relative peace. These episodes have closely followed patterns of ecconomic boom and bust and of infusions of large, undigested numbers of “aliens”-immigrants. But some of these upswings have also come partly as a rebellion against earlier waves of repression in the name of “decency" and order-the rebellion against prohibition that introduced wide spread organized crime is one example, the rejection of post-World War II conformity including the creation of a popular drug culture is another. Despite this repeating patern, never has the punitive swing of the cycle been so comprehensive and wide spread projecting itself into behavior issues far removed from true public safety concerns.
What we are witnessing is something deeper, something that will require a whole new moral and spiritual revolution to over turn. The Punitive Society is nothing more or less than the unacknowleged rebirth of a Calvinist world view in secular street clothes. It accepts at it core that humans are at their hearts of hearts naturally corrupt and wicked. An enlighted elect can preserve society from the ravages of depravity only by the arduous aplication of coersion at every level. People are animals who can only be constrained by fear of pain which in turn can only be elicited when they are shown the “consequences” of misbehavior by example in the punishment of others. They must at all time be “held accountable” by society because they certainly cannot be relied upon to discipline themselves. The only true justice in such a world view is patriarcal retribution. “Compassion” and “mercy” are not just weeknesses of sob sisters, but at all times the enemy of order and not to be tollerated.
In some ways it is not suprising that conservatives, who always treasured public order over all other virtues, would embrace such a world view. It is shared by elements of religious right that politically sustains them-although the embrace of redemption through faith by many Evangelicals threatens dangersously to undercut the uniform hard line. But other parts of this trend are in direct contradiction to the libertarian trend of modern conservatism-that government is best when it does not intrude into the daily lives of its citizens and that the least government is the best government.
Yet the Punitive Society empowers every level of government unprecedented authority over every aspect of our lives. It is hard to argue on one hand that the Federal government should impose no new restrictions on gun ownership while cheering the local ordinance that can lead your neighbor away in handcuffs for parking his pick-up truck overnight in his drive way.
In the end the Punitive Society transends the easy catagories of left and right. Both have surrended to the the rewards of righteousness when it has suited them, both arewilling to pile punishment upon punishment to advance their societal goals. And both have traditions of respect for individual liberty that they have often conveniently alowed to be suppressed.
The pendulum of history can not long be restrained at the farthest end of its arc. It must inevitabely swing the other direction. The question for us today is has that ultimate end yet been reached.