Apparently, the thing [after the Columbine killing spree] to do was to look not at the largest questions posed by the incident but rather at its particulars and to adopt a “zero tolerance” policy toward any behavior that seemed to mimic them. The result was a longish, culturally embarrassing interlude when kindergartners could get tossed out of school for bringing a nail clipper in a backpack. We began to look like a nation of adults who were terrified of our smallest children.
The one aspect of Columbine that seemed unworthy of examination — when it came to pondering the policy changes that might actually make American schools safer places — was the fact that the two killers had a long track record of doing exactly what deeply disturbed teenage boys have been doing since time out of mind: getting in trouble — lots of it — with authority.
Thought provoking and challenging article.
In the author’s favor is the long established knowledge that most violent crime is conducted by a known minority of the population. Separating them from the rest of us is harsh but if there is less incarceration around, say, low-level narcotics use, there would probably be a reduction in violent crime.
Against the article is the fact that many adults in the school system are women formed in liberal ideology. Any male physicality is, for them, “violence”. Just as we have the over-prescription of ADD/ADHD drugs, we could wind up with a large number of male children institutionalized under this article’s ideas.
The kid is only “separated” from the community if he is incarcerated in some way. Much as Ms. Flanagan seems to dismiss due process, you can’t just send “troublemakers” off to jail. You CAN expel them and it’s actually not difficult at all, contrary to her assertions.
I live in an upper-middle class neighborhood where half the parents are attorneys and the other half make more money than the superintendent of schools. A girl (yes, a girl) wrote a bomb threat on a bathroom wall in the high school (“a bomb is going to go off at 10:30 and kill everyone”). The school was evacuated. The police and bomb squad came, spent most of the day searching the school and went away quite p.o’d. They had a big investigation and found the culprit and she was expelled. She did NOT get back in and is now being tutored at home. She had no previous record.
But here’s the thing — if she was a psychopath who really wanted to blow up the whole school, expelling her would hardly stop her, would it? You’d have to have her locked up. And how long would you have to lock her up for? Would she be in a less homicidal mood at 20? 25? What is the sentence for writing a fake bomb threat?
Sorry — the facts are these. You can and should expel school bullies. However, it is extremely difficult to identify and permanently eliminate every potential juvenile psychopath. (God knows we can’t identify and eliminate the adult ones very well, can we?) What we CAN do is keep massive arsenals of weapons out of people’s hands — but we don’t want to.
The parents of these kids were AWOL. A child’s bedroom is not off limits to a parent and bombs were being made there. Don’t tell me that the school psychologist and counselor didn’t have huge cumulative folders on them and concerns about how dangerous they might be. They were probably assessed for E.D. placement.
Other students probably knew what was going down and kept quiet.
There is also something about a competitive upper middle class mostly white school that makes it more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents. In these kinds of schools socially inept and maladjusted kids are isolated, ridiculed and bullied. Our culture provides a vehicle for juvenile fantasy’s with movies like Matrix and video games that are essentially violent training films. These kids had what it takes to commit the massacre but the system allowed it to happen from top to bottom.
Park Dietz MD an outstanding forensic Psychiatrist brought in a team of specialists to evaluate what happened at Columbine and developed an excellent threat assessment profile for predicting these kinds of incidents. Did we learn something from this tragedy? Yes we did and legislation in California has led to “safe school environments” being a requirement in training curriculum for school psychologists and counselors.
I think it was Aristotle who said, “where there is no conscience, there must be law.” What we see is that law is a poor substitute for conscience.
90% of the problem in the schools is moral — not sociological or psycho-pathological. That is why upper-class kids form “good neighborhoods” with up-scale professional parents are still writing bomb threats on bathroom walls.
[i]”I am less concerned about how to “control†them than I am with how to reach them.” [/i]
Amen. And that might be a mission statement for all of us on T19.