Effects Of Zero Tolerance

Zero tolerance policies were originally created by the United States Customs Agency to address the prospering drug trade during the 1980s, known as the War on Drugs. In 1989, schools around the nation started to adopt these very policies to “restrict the discretion of school administrators and faculty in order to ensure an unbiased application of punishments for violent acts within school,” according to Alicia Pantoja, Sanna King, and Anthony Peguero in Stacy Mallicoat’s Crime and Criminal Justice: Concepts and Controversies (2016). The policies confronted issues including substance and weapon abuse, disruption, and disrespect, in hopes of deterring these behaviors. To help accomplish these goals, the presence of police in schools increased

To view the positive aspects and accomplishments first, in 1994, Congress passed the Gun-Free Schools Act – a law that established zero tolerance for all students enrolled in the United States’ public school system and mandated one year of expulsion, at the least, to any attendee who brings a firearm on school property. In Long Beach, California, officials discovered the following statistics: “overall school crime decreased 36 percent, fights decreased 51 percent, sex offenses decreased 74 percent, weapons offenses decreased 50 percent, assault and battery offenses decreased 34 percent, and vandalism decreased 18 percent” (The Constitutional Rights Foundation, n.d.). Now, although the rate of these crimes being committed has deteriorated in schools, it does not necessarily equate to these crimes deteriorating among the juvenile population or that other undesirable behaviors has not surfaced as a result. Zero tolerance policies were intended to eliminated bias and establish equal consequences for violating students. However, this has been untrue based on factors such as race, gender, socioeconomic statuses, culture and the list goes

Juveniles begin to not trust adults when they constantly feel as if they are a target in their eyes. Students become hesitant to reach out for help in fear of being punished (Pantoja, King & Peguero, 2016). The social labeling theory (Hahn, 2016) suggests that students, and adults, are likely to become exactly what society labels them as. Therefore, if students are branded as being “bad”, violent, and/or criminal offenders then they will act upon those images and juvenile crime rates will continue to increase. The NAACP (as cited in Heitzeg, 2014) states that there are over 3 million suspensions and over 100,000 expulsions every year, double the amount in 1974. The also reported that the rates spiked in the mid-1990s, when zero tolerance policies began to be implemented. Truancy laws decrease engagement in school which led to an increase in dropout rates (Pantoja, King, & Peguero, 2016). Of Georgia students with 15 or more absences from school including days of suspension, only a rough 31 percent go on to graduate; In addition, 70 percent of adult inmates in Georgia are high school dropouts (Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, 2016). Student dropouts then have excess free time on their hands allowing for more opportunity to commit crime. This relates to the social control theory where the more a person is involved in society, by various