From Social Exclusion to Shock in the War on Youth1
Christopher G. Robbins
A society unsure about the survival of its mode of being develops the mentality of a besieged fortress. The enemies who lay siege to its walls are its own, very own “inner demons:” the suppressed ambient fears which permeate its daily life, its “normality,” yet which, to make the daily reality endurable, must be squashed and squeezed out of the lived through quotidianity and moulded [sic] into an alien body—a tangible enemy with a name attached, an enemy one can fight, and fight again, and even hope to conquer.
—Zygmunt Bauman2
A cursory look at many public schools illuminates as much about their woeful “failings” as it does the erosion of public culture with the rise of the market society’s national security state. Our public culture, after all, sets the limits, imagines the possibilities, and rhetorically and materially commits to—or withdraws commitment from—public schools and the youth they serve, meaning that public schools reflect the society’s ethical and civic commitments to current and future generations.3 This holds true today no less than in Horace Mann’s time when he imagined the common school as the “balance-wheel of the social machinery,” the producer of literate citizens and a common political culture that would provide a bulwark against the erosion of the republic.4 We clearly live in different times. Having made public schools one of the principal targets in a social class war on public goods since the Reagan administrations, the U.S. transformed children and youth from being symbols of the future, a status ascribed to them during most of the twentieth century, into collateral casualties. While youth—even the concept of youth—could not but be collateral casualties of the war waged on essential institutions that serve them, it seems that some youth have recently become direct targets, inner demons to be fought, and fought again. With these redefined statuses, youth experience new and intensified forms of social control, raising questions about contemporary commitments to both youth and democracy.
In early October of 2009, a six-year-old momentarily captured the headlines of the New York Times, and his story traveled rapidly through the cable news and morning television circuits.5 Zachary Christie had been “suspended and … face[d] 45 days in [Christina School District’s] reform school.”6 The young boy, excited about his recent joining of the Cub Scouts, thought he brought his Cub Scout multi-purpose tool to school to use in eating his lunch. The only problem was the district, through the lens of its “code of conduct” (zero tolerance policy), saw a weapon. Rightfully indignant questions followed: Are these policies too stringent? Have schools gone too far? Why don’t administrators and teachers think?7 The short answer: Zero tolerance, as “zero tolerance,” militates against discretion. On June 4, 2009, a school resource officer tased a 17-year-old African American boy at Penn Hills High School (Pennsylvania). At the time of the report, the student faced potential felony charges for “assaulting an officer.” According to the officer’s chief, the student resisted and “pushed” the officer when the officer grabbed his arm in an attempt to lead him to the office for being guilty, in the first instance, of two most egregious offenses: being out of class and talking on a cell phone.8 This student’s story made the local news.
Both of these stories indicate much about the current contours in the war on youth, especially its educational front. The war on youth operates indiscriminately: It holds most children and youth in equal disdain as potential “threats.” On another, it generally deploys different tools of control and punishment on students of different racial and class backgrounds, producing disproportionate and different effects for students of color and other poor students—e.g., counseling or suspension versus introduction to the criminal justice system, or surveillance cameras versus random and intrusive metal detector checks and school resource officers (SROs) armed with (and apparently willing to use) tasers.9 What’s more, the latter story especially points to an intensification in the social control of youth and a related celebration of technology, particularly its use in producing “order,” “being tough,” “sending a strong message,” “establishing authority,” “teaching a lesson”—the semantic smog of such catchphrases strangely suffusing discourses about, and informing responses to, youth in schools as much as other ever-shifting targets in the “culture of cruelty.”10
If public schooling in the U.S. has been about anything, it has been primarily about control. Control is not necessarily a negative attribute or outcome of schooling; it is historical—the object and outcome of particular socio-political, -cultural, and -economic struggles at specific points in time, impacting the imaginations of those who are subjected to it on both sides of the line of power. For much of the twentieth century, social control was both the object and outcome of the hidden curriculum. Articulated as it was with the late industrial economy, the traditional hidden curriculum did more than socialize students into particular values and belief systems; it also acted as “an agency of social control, one that function[ed] to provide differential forms of schooling to different classes [and races] of students.”11 Generally, this mode of social control worked efficiently, especially when the social contract of the school was applied equitably across groups.12 Yet, even when the social contract of schools was ostensibly applied in uneven ways as a consequence of schools systematically shunting generally working-class kids and kids of color into less-esteemed vocational tracks, the allocation of educational opportunity, for better or worse, was typically linked to viable labor market outcomes and basic social rights, no matter how bifurcated the outcomes were along racial and class lines. Thus, the school did not, by way of the hidden curriculum, violate common perceptions of the economic purposes of public schools or outright betray students; it mediated students’ experiences and structured their opportunities in accordance with the industrial demands of a capitalist order stratified by a dual class structure. What’s more, during the middle third of the twentieth century, the liberal social contract associated with the New Deal and Great Society provided moderate institutional support and legitimation for wider public discourses that could—and occasionally did—check excesses of the hidden curriculum. It was during the decade following the Civil Rights Act (1964), for instance, that efforts made in the interests of school desegregation, gender equity (in sports), language rights and bilingual education, and students with disabilities, met with some of their greater successes, even if they were momentary and/or partial. And throughout this time, there was also a more palpable, even if weak, discourse on the relationship between schooling and the exercise of citizenship. This was, in other words, a time when a delicate, limited balance was struck between basic social, political, and economic rights, and the hidden curriculum appears to have provided a mode of social control that played at least a small role in steadying that balance.
Something changed in the structure and function of the hidden curriculum—and thus a primary mode of social control—beginning ultimately in 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk. Flatly pegging public schools, and by default teachers and students, as the primary culprits of economic and alleged moral malaise, this report plowed the discursive terrain upon which a decade of federal disinvestment in public schooling could take place. Federal funding for public schools dropped nearly 30 percent between 1981 and 1988, at the same time that inflation, declining wages, and falling property values pinched state and local education budgets.13 This disinvestment occurred alongside both the hemorrhaging of industrial labor and significant federal cuts to social welfare, community centers, and job retraining to name a few, cuts that obviously had the most devastating effects on poor rural and urban de-industrialized areas. Somewhat real, slightly exaggerated, or plainly fabricated in the first place, the failure of schools, or at least some schools, became not only a reality but also a functional component to the restructured economy by the early 1990s.14 And as the social contract in the wider society disintegrated with the evisceration of the social state, so too did the social contract of many schools. Unable or unwilling to rationalize spending on special programs and vocational education (given the massive federal budget cuts to these programs in particular), an extant economic crisis and reordered labor base, the traditional hidden curriculum of many schools, especially urban schools in de-industrialized hubs, came undone; schools could no longer even appear fair or just in their allocation of education opportunity as groups of students—particularly poor students and poor students of color—began to receive disproportionate punishment, exclusion, or placement in special education.15 The U.S. moved from blaming failing schools to blaming primarily “violent” youth in the early 1990s, abdicating adults of their responsibility in producing wide social, political, and cultural changes that failed the modern commitment to youth and the promise of a democratic future. The traditional hidden curriculum of industrial capitalist relationships was thusly transformed in many schools into a not-so-hidden curriculum of carceral relationships.16
The early and mid-1990s was subsequently the time when calls about “tough love” for youth rang out repeatedly, appearing across society in responses to a brief increase in youth violence and in moralistic films like Dangerous Minds and 187. These cries also rang in not-so-closeted racist prognostications about “super-predators” (read: urban, Black youth) and genetically inferior people of color and other poor people in pseudo-scientific policy statements of commentators like John DiIulio, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. But perhaps, the call for tough love registered the loudest in actual educational policy and the consequent material changes made to schools. In response to continued media focus on both real and exaggerated or disparate incidents of school violence, Senators Diane Feinstein (CA) and Byron Dorgan (ND), accordingly, co-authored the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 (GFSA), which Dorgan tellingly tagged “the law of the land” in a senate floor speech, this after three years of decline in youth violence in schools. As Title VIII in the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the GFSA mandated the following:
No assistance may be provided to any local educational agency under this Act unless such agency has in effect a policy requiring the expulsion from school for a period of not less than one year of any student who is determined to have brought a weapon to a school under the jurisdiction of the agency.17
Within the first year after GFSA was mandated, all states (except for Vermont) instituted a state-level zero tolerance policy. Most schools accordingly crafted local zero tolerance policies with caveats about guns and weapons (though the local definitions of weapons varied widely), and alcohol, tobacco, and “violent” behavior.18 Like the sweeping use of zero tolerance that took hold of other social policies, zero tolerance in schools grew into a far-reaching practice from which children have had criminal charges brought against them for behaviors as trivial as tossing peanuts on a bus, to an eight-year-old being suspended for pointing a chicken finger at a teacher and saying “pow-pow,” and any other range of behaviors that teachers (and administrators) have deemed “disruptive” to the classroom environment or “threatening” to school officials. These are common practices of zero tolerance at the local level, not statistical aberrations, as the overwhelming majority (over 70 percent) of documented exclusions due to zero tolerance are for “disruptive” behaviors or behaviors defined as “disorderly conduct” alone.19
As it passed from federal legislation to local practice, the expansion and distortion of GFSA produced deleterious effects, some of which have only intensified in recent years. Zero tolerance intensified a culture of fear in schools that merely reinforces ambient fears located in the wider society more generally. Exposed to a range of symbolic, domestic, economic, and physical violence in the wider society, students come to school and face other forms of violence and uncertainty. Unsure as they are about whether they will be fatally assaulted by another student (a possibility akin to being struck by lightning), be as likely to get suspended or expelled for breaking the school’s dress code as they would for breaking someone’s nose, or be tased for as much as disregarding a SRO’s pleas to end a cell phone conversation, schools expose students to, and to a degree enlist them in reinforcing, a formidable structure of fear. Making fear one of the central structuring elements of school relationships has not only redefined the image of children and youth but, in the process, it has also fundamentally redefined the teacher–student relationship and the construction and perception of teacher authority. Teacher authority has been weakened (or perverted in many instances) not only by the acritical practice of zero tolerance and abdication of responsibility, but also by the fact that much of traditional teacher authority in mediating and resolving classroom and school issues has been outsourced to SROs contracted with local police departments or private security firms, fracturing the conditions in which authority and discipline could become the shared product of mutualistic teacher–student and school community relationships. This effect of the war on youth has been documented in reference to New York City Public Schools, for example, where the New York Police Department controls a force of more than 4,600 school police officers that seems equally as willing to harass students, sometimes girl students, with extended frisking and wanding periods by male police officers or names like “baby Rikers” as they are to arrest teachers for “obstructing justice” in the instances they advocate for a student’s rights in an altercation with SROs.20 These dynamics and effects of the war on youth, nonetheless, appear in many districts across the U.S.21
While students’ rights have always been limited in public schools, contemporary school disciplinary and security measures also frequently threaten, if not plainly violate, students’ First, Fourth, Fourteenth and, increasingly, Ninth amendment rights in ways unknown and unimaginable to older generations.22 With regular and random metal detector checks, specious use of surveillance cameras and biometric technologies, random drug tests, searches conducted on students on false pretexts, and spectacular drug sweeps that resemble SWAT operations, SROs and school administrations regularly expect students to forfeit privacy rights upon request, lest they want to be charged with “obstructing justice” or, in some states’ definitions of zero tolerance, being “insubordinate” to school authorities—a charge that might spare one a trip to a detention center but will likely result in social exclusion in the form of a suspension or expulsion, nonetheless.23 Perhaps one of the more damaging effects of the violation of students’ First and Fourth Amendment rights, however, comes in the form of a subtle lesson with far-reaching socio-political effects, especially considering the authorizing power of public schools. Given students’ lack of political power and protection to contest search policies due to their age and relative place in school hierarchies, and the courts’ predictable deferral to school authorities’ powers in producing “order,” students learn or become habituated to the fact that it is “OK” for schools and any number of institutions associated with a purportedly democratic government to “search without cause, individualized suspicion, or apparent purpose” and “waive privacy protections for many purposes (e.g., a war on drugs or a war on terror)” or war on any inner demon de jure.24
Discipline and security measures also conjoin the wearing away of students’ first and Fourth Amendment rights with the erosion of Fourteenth Amendment rights. As detailed by Elora Mukherjee and Marvin Karpatkin, the mere security regimes through which students have to pass just to start their day in many New York City Schools keep students from up to two to three hours worth of instruction on a regular basis,25 violating equal treatment under the law and affronting equal educational opportunity; students in wealthier, whiter, typically suburban schools do not regularly run a gamut of security checkpoints and near-strip searches, especially during class time. But, when schools subject students to suspension and expulsion for violent and non-violent “offenses” alike, educational opportunity is further diminished or simply eliminated. As a state, Michigan is a testing ground for such social death where it allows schools to deny admission to a student expelled from another school, regardless of the nature of the student’s offense. Such policies and practices make access to educational opportunity nearly impossible for the bulk of racial and class minority students disproportionately subjected to them. And, especially in schools that have SROs, the quick link between school conduct violations and criminal offenses—the “school-to-prison pipeline”—is made that much more easily when students are referred to courts for non-criminal school offenses, a process that often lands students (of color) for stints in detention centers where the provision of educational opportunity, not to mention the regard for safety, has been documented to be spotty at best.26
Though the threat of punishment is undoubtedly presented to all youth, certain groups of students disproportionately suffer the actual punishments and the longer-standing consequences of the punitive mode of social control of the war on youth. According to a 2009 report done by the National Center for Education Statistics, 7 percent of all public school students were suspended for each of the 2002, 2004, and 2006 school years, the increases in actual suspensions from 3.1 to 3.3 million by 2006 evidently reflecting growth in the student population.27 While 5 percent of all white students were suspended in 2006, 15 percent of all African American students were suspended.28 These numbers reflect consistent patterns from states and districts across the nation since the legislation of GFSA in 1994, and the rates of racial disproportionality over time and place present an even more despairing image. In 2000, for example, African Americans constituted 32 percent of those students suspended nationally, while being only 17 percent of the student population, a disproportionality of index of approximately 2.0, though this rate varies wildly and upwardly in certain states and school districts.29 In Michigan in the 1999–2000 school year, for instance, African Americans constituted 28 percent of the student population but received 70 percent of statewide suspensions and 66 percent of expulsions, a disproportionality of 2.53 and 2.4 respectively, while white students’ suspension and expulsion disproportionality indexes were 0.83 and 0.84 respectively.30 Now consider a specific school district, Chicago Public Schools in the mid- to late 1990s. Expulsions in Chicago jumped from approximately 10 in 1994 to over 1,000 by the year 2000; 71 percent of those expulsions were given to African American students who were approximately 54 percent of the Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) student population—a rate of disproportionality of 1.331—while during the same period white students were expelled at a rate of 8 percent and were 9.1 percent of CPS’s student population—a rate of disproportionality of 0.8.32
Much of the racial disproportionality and increase in exclusion is found not in reported increases in school violence, but in stilted teacher and administrator perceptions of youth behavior. Subjective criteria in state- and local-level zero tolerance policies play no small part in framing these perceptions. Michigan’s state zero tolerance policy, for instance, allows for the suspension of a “pupil in grade 6 or above who commits a verbal assault, as defined by the local school board policy, against an employee or volunteer of the school district” (emphasis added),33 resulting in the codification of “insubordination” and “creating disruptive conditions” in local zero tolerance policies as grounds for suspension. The effects of such definitional fogginess are astounding when, for example, in Ann Arbor Public Schools, a city and school district (self-) touted for its progressivism and commitments to multiculturalism, “black students were suspended in [2006/2007] for insubordination 83 times versus 20 suspensions of white students for that reason. Black students were [also] suspended 102 times for creating disruptive conditions, while white students were suspended only 37 times for that reason,” with suspensions for other “subjective offenses” like “loitering” following similar racial patterns.34 White students and African American students constitute 62 percent and 18 percent of the student population in Ann Arbor public schools, indicating that the disproportionality index for suspension due to insubordination was 4.0 for African Americans and 0.17 for whites. Cynics, of course, ask, “Don’t these numbers reflect specific schools’ attentiveness to higher levels of violence perpetrated by African Americans?” No, insubordination is a subjective term, as opposed to “hit” or even “physically accosted.” These numbers point to larger questions concerning cultural capital gaps between teachers and students, general school climate and the perceived fairness by which teacher authority operates, not to mention questions concerning the relationship between schools and the wider communities from which students come.
Unsurprisingly, the integration of subtle and not-so-subtle security measures into schools has intensified apace with the aforementioned punitive policies and practices, and this integration generally follows racial patterns.35 The National Center for Education Statistics collects data on a range of school security measures, and the racial gap in the use of many of these measures in the 2005–2006 school year is telling. For example, controlled access to grounds occurs in 56.3 percent of schools with student populations constituted by “more than 50 percent” minority enrollment compared to 32 percent of schools with “5 percent to less than 20 percent” minority enrollment. Student identification badges follow accordingly with 10.1 percent of predominantly minority enrollment and 3.8 percent predominantly white enrollment using them. Eleven percent of schools with predominantly minority enrollment deploy random metal detector checks as opposed to 1.2 percent of schools with predominantly white enrollment; data on daily metal detector checks could not be verified in schools with less than 50 percent minority enrollment, but 3.3 percent of predominantly minority schools use daily metal detector checks. Schools with predominantly minority populations also use student uniforms as a security measure at noticeably higher rates than predominantly white schools—34.8 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively. Random drug searches and contraband sweeps and security cameras were more “equitably” used across schools.36 Yet, one “security measure” missing from the National Center of Education Statistics is tasers.
“Don’t tase me, Bro!” entered the vernacular after images of Andrew Meyer, a University of Florida student, being stunned by campus police officers in September of 2007 during a talk by Senator John Kerry populated cable news shows and the Internet. Since taser manufacturers and law enforcement agencies tout tasers for their purported efficacy in apprehending violent suspects, it would appear to the casual viewer that Meyer’s principal offense was, in the first instance, the exercise of his First Amendment rights in asking Kerry pesky questions. Meyer’s is only the most iconic image of the electric years of the war on youth, the gravity of the image, at the same time, seemingly becoming a perverse punch line of sorts on shirts and bumper stickers, due to his initial paradoxical response to the officers. Taser use is no laughing matter.
Tasers—stun guns—discharge 50,000 volts into their human targets, allegedly providing a “less-lethal” method for “control[ling] or incapacitat[ing] dangerous, combative or high-risk suspects.”37 Taser use by SROs has increased over the past four to five years, shortly after local law enforcement agencies added tasers to their repertoire.38 Over 12,000 of 18,000 police departments currently equip agents with tasers and,39 as of 2006 (the most recent year for which statistics could be found), more than 1,700 of these agencies have equipped their SROs with tasers.40 Still, it is possible that more than a few local law enforcement agencies have equipped their SROs with tasers but have failed to communicate to the school district and the wider community that they have done so, something that became apparent to administrators of schools in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the beginning of the 2009–2010 school year.41 Further, since many public schools contract security with private firms that arm their agents with tasers and do not show up in surveys of local law enforcement agencies, it is difficult, at the time of this writing, to determine even an approximate number of public schools that condone the use of tasers.
To argue that tasers can effectively deal with or resolve school violence seems like a dangerous line to inform educational policy and practice. Yet, SROs argue this very line in rationalizing the use of tasers in schools. A leading organization on school safety, National School Safety and Security Services (NSSSS), claims that only a “handful of anecdotal incidents have occurred which suggest questionable judgment in the use of Tasers by a very few officers on juveniles.”42 After ironically using a handful of anecdotal incidents to show how tasers “have been used to subdue violent assailants in schools,” NSSSS explains with measured recommendations that SROs “have noted that the Taser can potentially be helpful” on “adult non-student intruders” and “students” alike “when no other intervention beyond the use of a firearm is an option.”43 One must say that NSSSS has one of the saner positions on Taser use in schools. However, such a position presupposes that SROs not only operate primarily on this assumption but also, being trained as SROs, are predisposed to react to student behaviors as if they were students and not, in fact, hardened criminals. This does not always seem to be the case, especially for an eleventh-grader in North Carolina, Angel Debnam, a student who thought she was attempting to intervene in a school fight. After being instructed by an SRO to go to the office, she complied—only to be tased. A student witness heard Debnam’s scream and gave the following account: “[S]he’s sitting there shaking and screaming, ‘That hurts!’ He does it again, but it’s really awkward — the fact that he as [sic] a smile planted on his face.”44 To add insult to injury, Debnam was subsequently “arrested and charged with resisting arrest.”45
Taser International, the main producer of tasers, refuses to provide universal recommendations for the use of tasers. Instead, it leaves protocol formulation to local law enforcement agencies. Much like the distortion and expansion of zero tolerance policy as it moved from federal to local policy, this position seems to create conditions in which the taser can be used for anything and everything that local law officials deem “threatening” or “violent.” This is a distinct possibility when local law enforcement agencies—or even school administrators—opt to place no restrictions or limitations on taser use. A Franklin County, North Carolina, school administrator said publicly that tasers could be used whenever students “did not obey a specific rule.”46 Consider the following. In March of 2008, an 11-year-old girl with a learning disability was tased in an Orange County school in Florida. Having been reported by another student to a teacher for allegedly pushing a classmate into the street, the girl ignored the teacher’s inquiries and proceeded to her homeroom where she was approached by her teacher and became aggravated. A SRO was called to the room to apprehend the student, at which time the young girl punched the officer in the face. This student, too, was arrested and, at the time of the report, “face[d] charges of battery on a law enforcement officer, disrupting a school function and resisting with violence.”47 In November of 2004, Miami-Dade police tased a 12-year-old girl and a first-grade boy in separate incidents. The girl had been skipping school and, when found by the police officer, she fled, running into traffic. The officer claimed to have tased her in the back of the neck and lower back for “her safety.” The six-year-old boy was found with a piece of glass in school, threatening to cut himself. Again, the officer allegedly used the taser in the interests of protecting the student’s safety.48 In July of 2009, a 14-year-old, New Mexico girl was tased. In the midst of a family argument, the girl’s mom took her to the police station, and the girl fled to a nearby park. When approached by the cop, the girl tried to run away. She was shot in the head with a taser dart, leaving a wound that required 18 staples and six stitches to repair. That the girl was non-violent, had not broken a law and did not appear to pose a threat seems beside the point for the officer.49 These events are not nearly the only examples of taser use on youth, but they are demonstrative of the wide range of conditions in which and the alleged reasons for which tasers have been used on youth in school or out. Such examples also demonstrate that, even if uniform protocol were put in place for taser use, law enforcement agents would likely have non-uniform interpretations of “violent” behavior. This much we know from teacher and SRO interpretations of “violent,” “disruptive,” or “threatening” behavior in relation to zero tolerance, especially when such descriptors like “violent” and “threatening” are applied to particular groups of students. And given what is known about the types of schools that have regular, full-time SROs—that they are larger, typically poorer, and constituted by students of color—the likelihood of racially disproportionate use of tasers is high, regardless of what protocol were to be put in place. Evidence exists to support this assumption, and the evidence is tragic: Of youth and adult deaths related to taser use, “90 (45 per cent) of those who died were black,” though African Americans represent approximately 12 percent of the general population.50
Taser use in schools and the more generalized process of criminalizing students clearly follow from the genesis of tough-love policy formulation in the 1990s.51 At the same time, taser use and other forms of punishment also illustrate the ways children and youth are subjected to newer and intensified forms of social control that mark a significant break. What can be observed in the (re) turn to hyper-punitive social control of youth is a reorganization of the relationships between the individual and the social. Such reorganization also portends, if not produces in the process, subsequent political consequences.
On the simplest level of the individual, taser use demonstrate reversals on modern values that placed a vested interest in the physical, psychological, and social safety of youth. Because of the relatively recent integration of tasers into law enforcement and obvious ethical issues involved in doing a controlled study of taser use on children (or adults), little consensus exists between industry, scientists, and human rights groups in regards to short- or long-term physical or psychological effects of taser use on people. What is known is that since 2001, hundreds of deaths have occurred in relation to taser use.52 Many of these deaths have been written off by law enforcement agencies as coincidental, arguing that drugs or a pre-existing condition were the cause, though a number of cases show that taser use has directly caused the death of adolescents. At the same time, when enough evidence exists to show that rationales for actual taser use are inconsistent at best and when it is known that taser use inflicts considerable pain, the need to provide “scientific” data on the alleged safety of taser use, especially their use on children and youth, illuminates much about contemporary commitments to youth, much less the general moral health of the nation. Of course, supporters of taser use will ask, “How are SROs carrying tasers any different than SROs being armed? SROs have been armed for years.” When supporters tout tasers for their “less than lethal” capacity, the likelihood of tasers being used increases in situations where a) a firearm would not be used anyhow and b) other options for restraint of a violent or resistant person would be used or would not be necessary at all—like a six-year-old threatening to harm himself or a girl compliantly walking to a principal’s office. Perhaps it is this type of disregard for discretion and respect for rights that is cause for the United Nations (UN) to condemn taser use as a form of torture.53 It is widely known, however, how a strand of U.S. authorities and many citizens feel about both the UN and torture.54
Taser use unsurprisingly challenges students’ rights—specifically free speech, equality of treatment, and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Consider again the example of Angela Debnam. What if a teacher told her to go to the principal’s office and, instead of complying, she questioned the teacher’s judgment? Within limits, students have a basic right to question a teacher’s actions as long as they are not disrupting the functioning of the school. The teacher might reprimand the student, possibly even suspend the student for “insubordination.” Yet, when an SRO is involved, suddenly the right to ask questions translates into to the legal shock of “obstructing justice” or “resisting arrest” or “resisting an officer’s commands.” And worse: The psycho-social shock of exclusion conjoins with physical shock. Of course, this point raises larger questions about the role and impact of SROs in schools.55 However, when such authority is combined with injudicious taser use, a devastating violation of students’ First and Ninth Amendment rights occurs. Simply, taser use has in many instances violated, and will likely violate, both the welfare and agency rights of many students, the former set of rights being a primary ethical charge of schools, the latter set a limited historical charge of schools.56
Taser use and other forms of punitive social control potentially present their greatest danger to students and the wider public on the collective level. Henry Giroux has insightfully analyzed a “biopolitics of disposability” that operates on and in reference to youth with the national security state and still conspicuous neoliberal market society.57 Beyond the simply perverse and contradictory commitments made to youth by the national security state, the biopolitics of disposability operates on one of the primary features of neoliberalism: the collapse of the social into the individual, the public into the private. Numerous studies of punitive social control in schools document that actual and perceived student “violence” and “disruption” is correlated with a range of factors ranging from school social class and racial demographics to, unsurprisingly, resource allocation. Schools with higher class sizes, comparatively fewer soft and hard resources, comparatively fewer qualified and experienced teachers, and extant and visible social class/racial animosities played out in the (not-so-) hidden curriculum provide conditions in which even the perception of “disruption” or enacting of actual physical violence are more likely to occur.58 Taser use, perhaps much more powerfully than even the social exclusion of students, responds with a specifically individualized response to symptoms of deeper, more serious, and typically more frequent forms of violence—systemic and symbolic violence. Taser use in schools especially demonstrates disturbingly that the continued expansion of social and economic problems in schools and out is rivaled only by the continued contraction of our political responses to them, and youth seem to be getting squeezed the most.
Related to the collapse of the social into the individual in taser use and other forms of hyper-punitive social control is ethical distancing and the erosion of moral bonds in schools, not to mention the intensified erosion of public trust in schools. The preeminent sociologist Zygmunt Bauman uses the term “adiaphorization” to name this process by which institutions and groups “mak[e] certain actions morally indifferent, exempt from moral evaluation.”59 There are three distinct steps that can be identified in making hyper-punitive social control in schools exempt from moral evaluation. First, an inner demon for which general ethical considerations can be suspended needs to be produced: Scapegoat individuals who manifest symptoms—e.g., “disruption” or “poor test scores”—of underlying malaise as the malaise itself. This is the move where, Lawrence Grossberg observes, U.S. rhetorics about youth have slid from “kids in trouble, kids have problems, and kids are threatened, to kids as trouble, kids as problems, kids as threatening.”60 In the process, more privileged groups (e.g., adults, corporations, politicians) mask their roles in the underlying malaise and their relationship to the inner demons. Second, redefine the roles of other members (e.g., teachers) of the system by way of specific policy (e.g., zero tolerance) or indirectly as an “unintended” consequence of other policy (e.g., high-stakes schooling). The roles of other members (e.g., students) subsequently have to change as the “Other” against which teachers’ new roles are defined and, in the process, the relationships between the two groups reorganize. One becomes a clerk-guard concerned with data-“threats,” the other—as data-“threat”—easy to manipulate and much easier to harm. Third, traditional members (e.g., teachers and administrators, even parents) can be by-passed altogether, with the outsourcing of their positive power in shaping school relationships to SROs, the courts, and the prison system, translating student and school issues into legal and criminal ones to be handled by “appropriate” experts whose “job” it is to deal with such issues. So, while other forces have been at play—intensive privatization efforts, school choice, defunding of public schools, etc., it is unsurprising that public trust in public schools has eroded alongside the moral authority of teachers and schools with the rise of hyper-punitive modes of social control.
Lastly, but not least, public schools are, after all, pedagogical institutions. Much of what students learn, and learn deeply, in schools is learned by way of the relationships in which they perform certain roles in the context of everyday life. It is in these relationships, more than through stultifying history lessons about powerful military or political leaders, where students come to learn about power, authority, respect, responsibility—because of the way these relationships and their supporting ideologies work not only on students’ minds but also on, in, and through their bodies, something taser use does so plainly. When combined with the public pedagogical power of other facets of the criminalization and militarization of schools, a power many contributors to this volume and I have explored, the sheer spectacular nature of taser use can produce dizzying pedagogical effects, both for students directly shocked and for student witnesses. While students know when school officials remove individuals from school, either because they see the student being walked off to the office or in handcuffs or they do not see their classmate the next day, SROs taser individual students—often on full display—for the many to see. When students witness other students being harmed by adults, on ever-shifting grounds and floating rationales, powerful lessons could be learned. For example, public schools, as the most immediate representation of “the public” for youth, can come to be seen as mere purveyors of force rather than institutions involved in persuasion, self- and social production. This lesson could cut in four related ways: 1) Students could come to despise, rather than healthfully distrust, the government, its supporting institutions, and its representatives, and along with this despise the weakened democratic ideals associated with them; 2) think supportively of the government, its supporting institutions, and its representatives in their roles as purveyors of force, a lesson that bodes poorly for democracy and democratic politics given the elevated status of the military and police in other spheres of society; 3) learn that the love of machines and technologies of punishment transcends a basic love and respect for human dignity; and 4) believe that the space of the public is not for dialogue, debate, the formulation of vision, the assuming of shared responsibility, but for the mere exercise of concentrated power and the production of inner demons on which to exercise that power through shame and harm.
Clearly, the war on youth is a war on democracy and a democratic future. And, because the war on youth so explicitly illuminates the larger war, it perhaps teaches another lesson, one that John Dewey attempted to teach almost a century ago. Democracy does not automatically reproduce itself, even on the symbolic level because, as conditions change, not only do representations of democracy change but so do responses to perceived challenges and threats posed to it.61 For this reason, Dewey argued that democracy had to be renewed with each generation in embodied values and lived relationships. Public schools have always been precariously positioned between fulfilling social, political, and economic and military goals. It is because of public schools’ mediating role between these interests, youth, and the future that they are so subject to enclosure by processes of commercialization, criminalization, and militarization today. It is also because of this still extant mediating role, and the fact that adults still have a responsibility to youth today and tomorrow, that schools can and should be engaged for their relationship to democratic public life. The current alternatives are literally too shocking.
1 I extend my gratitude and love to my wife, Aryana, who helped with this piece in innumerable ways. I thank Joe Bishop and Rob Carpenter for various conversations associated with the development of this argument. I also thank Serhiy Kovalchuk for his research assistance early in the project.
2 Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007), 129.
3 See the following books that address the relationship between youth, politics, and the future: Lawrence Grossberg, Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America’s Future (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005), Henry A. Giroux, Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), Henry A. Giroux, Public Space/Private Lives: Democracy beyond the Culture of Cynicism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), and Henry A. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? (New York: Palgrave, 2009).
4 Horace Mann, Annual Reports on Education (New York: Lee, Shepard, and Dillingham, 1872), 669.
5 See Ian Urbina, “It’s a Fork, It’s a Spoon, … It’s a Weapon?” New York Times (October 11, 2009), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/education/12discipline.html?_r=1 (accessed April 22, 2010).
6 Ibid.
7 Countless similar and sometimes even pettier violations of zero tolerance have occurred over the last 15 years. Many of these other examples were not reported widely, if at all in some cases. See various contributions to William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Rick Ayers (Eds.), Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in Our Schools (New York: The New Press, 2001). See also the following: Judith A. Browne, Derailed: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track (Washington, D.C.: The Advancement Project, 2003); Judith A. Browne, Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track (Washington, D.C.: The Advancement Project, 2005); Elora Mukherjee and Marvin M. Karpatkin, Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools (New York: ACLU, 2007).
8 See The Tribune-Review, “Police Officer Uses Taser on Male Student at Penn Hills High School,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (June 4, 2009), available at http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/breaking/s_628177.html (accessed April 22, 2010).
9 See Christopher G. Robbins, Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2008). See also the following: Paul J. Hirschfield, “Preparing for Prison?: The Criminalization of School Discipline in the USA,” Theoretical Criminology 12, 1 (2008): 79–101; Erica Meiners, Right to be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies (New York: Routledge, 2007); Russell Skiba, “When is Disproportionality Discrimination? The Overrepresentation of Black Students in School Suspensions,” in Ayers, Dohrn, and Ayers, Zero Tolerance, 176–187; Browne, Education on Lockdown.
10 The term “culture of cruelty” comes from Henry A. Giroux. See Henry A. Giroux, “Living in a Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle,” Truthout (September 2, 2009), available at: http://www.truthout.org/090209R (accessed April 22, 2010). Writing in response to a much different time and set of socio-political and economic forces in “Education after Auschwitz,” Theodor Adorno identified an intensified hardness toward the rearing of youth and a love of technology (and hence moral distancing from other humans) as elements involved in constructing the “authoritarian personality.” See Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), especially 196–202.
11 Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Theory for the Opposition (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2001), 47.
12 For an explanation of the relationship between the social contract of schools and social control, see Pedro Noguera, “Schools, Prisons, and the Social Implications of Punishment: Rethinking Disciplinary Practices,” Theory into Practice 42, 4 (2003): 341–350. For an extended analysis of the erasure of the social contract in general and its role in producing the “not-so-hidden curriculum” of zero tolerance, see Christopher G. Robbins, Expelling Hope, especially Chapter 2.
13 For an analysis of the relentless education funding cuts during the Reagan years, see Deborah A. Verstegen and David L. Clark, “The Diminution of Federal Expenditures on Education during the Reagan Administration,” Phi Delta Kappan 70, 2 (1988): 134–138.
14 For a history of the “school crisis,” see David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
15 Relationships between resource allocation, punishment and exclusion, and special education placement have been widely documented. For an insightful case study on this issue, see Michael Eskenazi, Gillian Eddins, and John M. Beam, Equity or Exclusion: The Dynamics of Resources, Demographics, and Behavior in New York City Public Schools (New York: National Center for Schools and Communities, 2003).
16 I analyzed this transformation at length in Expelling Hope, especially Chapter 2. See also the following: Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, especially Chapter 2, and Hirschfield, “Preparing for Prison.”
17 Public Law 103-227, Gun-Free Schools Act (1994). SEC 1031, 20 USC 2701.
18 See U.S. Department of Education, “Safe and Gun-Free Schools Act Final Report: School Year 1997–1998.”
19 See Judith A. Browne, Derailed, also Education on Lockdown. See also Kary Moss, Reclaiming Michigan’s Throwaway Kids: Students Trapped in the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Detroit, MI: Michigan American Civil Liberties Union, 2009).
20 See Mukherjee and Karpatkin, Criminalizing the Classroom, 16.
21 See Judith Browne, Derailed and Kary Moss, Reclaiming Michigan’s Throwaway Kids.
22 For a blistering analysis of this issue, see Randall R. Beger, “Expansion of Police Power in Public Schools and the Vanishing Rights of Students,” Social Justice 29, 1 (2002): 119–130.
23 For an extended study of the various security technologies adopted by schools in recent years, see Ronnie Casella, Selling Us the Fortress: The Promotion of Techno-Security for Schools (New York: Routledge, 2006).
24 Joe Blankenau and Mark Leeper, “Public School Search Policies and the ‘Politics of Sin,’” Policy Studies Journal 31, 4 (2003): 582.
25 Mukherjee and Karpatkin, Criminalizing the Classroom.
26 See James Bell, “Education, Delinquency, and Incarceration,” in Ayers, Dohrn, and Ayers, Zero Tolerance, 136–142. See also Moss, Reclaiming Michigan’s Throwaway Kids.
27 See M. Planty, W. Hussar, T. Snyder, G. Kena, A. Kewal-Ramani, J. Kemp, K. Bianco, and R. Dinkes, The Condition of Education 2009 (NCES 2009-081), (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education, 2009), 70.
28 Ibid.
29 For an analysis of national rates of racial disproportionality in suspension, see Kimberly Brooks, Vincent Schiraldi, and Jason Ziedenberg, Schoolhouse Hype: Two Years Later (Washington, D.C.: Justice Policy Institute, 2000).
30 This data comes from Michigan Public Policy Initiative, Spotlight: Zero Tolerance Policies and Their Impact on Michigan Students (Lansing, MI: Institute for Children, Youth, and Families, Michigan State University, 2000), 6-8.
31 Terry Keleher, Racial Disparities Related to School Zero Tolerance Policies: Testimony to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Oakland, CA: Applied Research Center, 2000), 2.
32 Rebecca Gordon, Libero Della Piana, and Terry Keleher, Facing the Consequences: An Examination of Racial Discrimination in U.S. Public Schools (Oakland, CA: Applied Research Center, 2000), 12.
33 Michigan Department of Education, Pupil Accounting Manual (Lansing, MI: Michigan Department of Education, 2007), 5N-2. Available at http://www.michigan.gov/documents/5N-SuspendExpulsion_41714_7.pdf (accessed April 22, 2010).
34 Moss, Michigan’s Throwaway Kids, 22.
35 For an extensive and insightful analysis of the increasing relationship between the security industries and public schools, again see Ronnie Casella, Selling Us the Fortress. See also Tyson Lewis, “The School as an Exceptional Space: Rethinking Education from the Perspective of the Biopedagogical,” Educational Theory 56, 2 (2006): 159–176.
36 All data related to security measures in this paragraph comes from Rachel Dinkes, Jana Kemp, Katrina Baum, and Thomas D. Snyder, Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2008 (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education, and Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice, 2009), 128–129.
37 Amnesty International, “Less than Lethal?” The Use of Stun Weapons in US Law Enforcement (London: Amnesty International, 2008), 9.
38 Unfortunately, taser use in schools has not been addressed in the academic literature, despite an important and growing archive of research on school disciplinary practices and security measures. What’s more, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), despite its elaborate data collection on school security measures, does not have figures on the amount of school resource officers carrying/using tasers. Key works on school disciplinary practices and security measures include but are not limited to the following: Giroux, Public Space/Private Lives; Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society; Christopher G. Robbins, “Zero Tolerance and the Politics of Racial Injustice,” Journal of Negro Education 74, 1 (2005): 2–17; Robbins, Expelling Hope; Meiners, Right to be Hostile; Ayers, Dohrn, and Ayers (Eds.), Zero Tolerance; Ronnie Casella, At Zero Tolerance: Punishment, Prevention, and School Violence (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); Casella, Selling Us the Fortress; John Devine, Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Grossberg, Caught in the Crossfire, especially Chapter 1; Noguera, “Schools, Prisons, and the Social Implications of Punishment”; Mukherjee and Karpatkin, Criminalizing the Classroom; Moss, Reclaiming Michigan’s Throwaway Kids; Browne, Education on Lockdown; Hirschfield, “Preparing for Prison”; Bryan A. Warnick, “Surveillance Cameras in Schools: An Ethical Analysis,” Harvard Educational Review 77, 3 (2007): 317–343; Ben Brown, “Understanding and Assessing School Police Officers: A Conceptual and Methodological Comment,” Journal of Criminal Justice 34 (2006): 591–604.
39 See Amnesty International, “Public Statement: USA: Justice Department’s Interim Report into Deaths Points to Need for Strict Limits on Use of Tasers and Similar Devices” (London: Amnesty International, June 25, 2008), available at http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR51/067/2008/en/ab2afaed-42b4-11dd-9452-091b75948109/amr510672008eng.pdf (accessed April 22, 2010).
40 In March of 2009, Jack Leonard and Richard Winton of the Los Angeles Times reported that 4,000 agencies had equipped their school and campus officers with tasers. In correspondence with Alternet and Liliana Segura, Steve Tuttle of Taser International confirmed this number, saying that it includes agencies that have equipped SROs with tasers, and college and university police departments that equipped their officers with tasers. The number of agencies obviously grew since 2006, but it is difficult to say how much of this growth was in agencies equipping SROs. See Jack Leonard and Richard Winton, “Hawthorne Police Review Use of Taser on Middle School Student,” Los Angeles Times (March 2, 2009), available at http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/02/local/me-taser2 (accessed April 22, 2010). See Liliana Segura, “A Recipe for Disaster: School Cops are Being Armed with 50,000-Volt Tasers,” Alternet (September 16, 2009), available at http://www.alternet.org/rights/142652/a_recipe_for_disaster%3A_school_cops_are_being_armed_with_50%2C000-volt_tasers/ (accessed April 22, 2010).
41 See J. Brian Ewing, “School Police Carry Tasers, Told No One,” News and Record (September 24, 2009), available at: http://www.news-record.com/content/2009/09/23/article/school_police_carry_tasers_told_no_one (accessed April 22, 2010).
42 National School Safety and Security Services, “Tasers and Police in Schools,” available at: http://www.schoolsecurity.org/trends/tasers.html (accessed April 22, 2010).
43 Ibid.
44 Cited in Kevin Ward, “Girl Tasered at School,” WTVD-TV (January 13, 2006), available at: http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/local&id=3806891 (accessed April 22, 2010). See also Segura, “A Recipe for Disaster.”
45 Ward, “Girl Tasered at School.”
46 Rebecca C. Headen and Ian A. Mance, “Not There Yet: The Need for Safer Taser Policies in North Carolina” (City, NC: North Carolina Taser Safety Project, 2008), especially 3; available at: http://acluofnc.org/files/NotThereYet.pdf (accessed April 22, 2010). I have extensively addressed the expansion and distortion of zero tolerance.
47 Internet Broadcasting Systems and Local6.com, “Officials: Deputy Shocks Girl, 11, at Elementary School” (March 28, 2008), available at: http://www.clickorlando.com/news/15721677/detail.html (accessed April 22, 2010).
48 Both of these events were reported by CNN. See Susan Candiotti, “Police Review Policy after Tasers Used on Kids; Police Defend Nonlethal Use of Force” (November 15, 2004), available at: http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/11/14/children.tasers/index.html (accessed April 22, 2010).
49 See News Channel 3, “Policeman Hits New Mexican Girl in Head with Taser,” WWMT (July 7, 2009), available at http://www.wwmt.com/articles/new-1364381-mexico-girl.html (accessed April 22, 2010). See also KRQE, “Tucumcari Police Chief Put on Leave,” KRQE (July 7, 2009), available at http://www.krqe.com/dpp/news/politics/politics_ap_tucumcari_police_chief_placed_on_leave_200907071429 (accessed April 22, 2010). For a video report on this incident and the physical consequences this girl experienced, see “14 yr old girl Tasered in the Head by Police Chief in New Mexico,” available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzHDP3gLDJw (accessed April 22, 2010).
50 Amnesty International, “Less than Lethal?,” 22. Of the 334 documented deaths that have occurred after taser use, Amnesty International reports that 299 deaths were of unarmed suspects (Amnesty International, “Less than Lethal?,” 78.
51 In some ways, hyper-punitive social control in schools also points hauntingly to a time, early in modern state formation or earlier, before children and youth were recognized both as having a different status than adults and as canvasses upon which images of a future, a democratic future, were painted. Of course, this idea was explored extensively by Michel Foucault. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). See also Barbara Finkelstein (Ed.), Regulated Children/Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979).
52 Amnesty International, “Less than Lethal?”
53 Mike Nizza, “U.N. Torture Panel Singles out Tasers,” New York Times (November 26, 2007), available at http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/un-torture-panel-singles-out-tasers/ (accessed April 22, 2010).
54 Heather Maher, “New Poll Finds Americans Favor U.S. Isolationism, Acting Alone,” Radio Free Europe (December 4, 2009), available at http://www.rferl.org/content/New_Poll_Finds_Americans_Favor_US_Isolationism_Acting_Alone/1894924.html (accessed April 22, 2010). Maher, reporting on a Pew Research Center poll, tells readers that “Just over half of Americans (54 percent) say torture is at least sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists, compared with 44 percent who said so 10 months ago.”
55 See Brown, “Understanding and Assessing School Police Officers.” See also Mukherjee and Karpatkin, Criminalizing the Classroom.
56 Coupled with harsh sentencing laws and the proliferation of laws that target social behaviors of youth in the wider society, hyper-punitive social control in schools further indicates that there is afoot a substantive “destabilizing” of “discourses of rights” for children and youth, which, by extension, points to a more general destabilizing—of democratic politics. See Susan Ruddick, “Abnormal, the ‘New Normal,’ and Destabilizing Discourses of Rights,” Public Culture 18, 1 (2006): 53–77.
57 Henry A. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society.
58 See Eskenazi, Eddins, and Beam, Equity or Exclusion. See David Eitle and Tamara M. Eitle, “Segregation and School Violence,” Social Forces 82, 2 (2003): 589–615. See also Pauline Lipman, “Education Accountability and the Repression of Democracy Post-9/11,” Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies 2, 1 (2004), available at http://www.jceps.com/?pageID=article&articleID=23 (accessed April 22, 2010).
59 Zygmunt Bauman as cited in Harald Welzer, “On the Rationality of Evil: An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman,” Thesis Eleven 70 (2002): 104.
60 Grossberg, Caught in the Crossfire, 16.
61 See Richard J. Bernstein, “Creative Democracy—The Task Still Before Us,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 21, 3 (2000): 215–228.