A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What It Means for Justice by David Alan Sklansky

Author:David Alan Sklansky [Sklansky, David Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Law, Criminal Law, General, Political Science, Law Enforcement, Social Science, Violence in Society
ISBN: 9780674248908
Google: 578TEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: HarvardUP
Published: 2021-03-23T20:48:22+00:00

School Shootings, Zero Tolerance, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

In the middle of the 1990s—right around 1994 or 1995—rates of youth violence in the United States began to decline sharply. By the end of the decade they had returned to the levels of the early 1980s. During the same period, though, there was an increase in what the FBI calls “active shooter” incidents at elementary and secondary schools: episodes in which someone with a gun fires indiscriminately in a populated area in an effort to kill people. Most of the shooters were students or former students at the schools in which the rampages took place. Incidents of this kind remained relatively uncommon, and they were a very small fraction of juvenile homicides, but they received a great deal of media attention—partly because the school setting and the mass, indiscriminate nature of the killings were particularly horrifying, and partly because the rampages occurred in places, and among populations of young people, not usually victimized by gun violence. All of this was true of the most notorious school shooting of the 1990s, the 1999 massacre of twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School, in the suburban, middle-class, largely white community of Littleton, Colorado. At the time, Columbine was the deadliest school shooting in the nation’s history.27

One thing the school shootings of the late 1990s did have in common with the surge in youth homicide in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the involvement of guns. Virtually all of the increase in juvenile homicide in the 1980s and 1990s, and virtually the entire drop in juvenile homicide in the late 1990s, involved gun homicides. The killings at Columbine sparked a nationwide debate about gun control, but no major legislation emerged from that debate. Instead, the largest impact that school shootings had on public policy in the late 1990s and early 2000s was to reinforce the kinds of concerns that characterized the superpredator scare: concerns that there was something new and different about contemporary adolescents, that we were seeing a new, more violent breed of juveniles. As a result, the drive to prosecute more minors as adults continued well into the 2000s, long after rates of juvenile violence had plummeted and the superpredator theory had been discredited.28

The school shootings of the 1990s also prompted new worries about the physical safety of schools. Those worries, in turn, were addressed in two main ways. The first was a “hardening” of schools: new metal detectors, armed guards, security cameras, and locked gates.29 The second was a crackdown on violations of school disciplinary rules, including bullying.

There is a very long tradition of treating assaults and physical threats among schoolchildren and adolescents, particularly boys, as an inevitable part of growing up, and possibly even salutary. Part of growing up was learning to take care of yourself, learning not to be a sissy. (That is the idea that the radio host Laura Ingraham was invoking when she taunted a reporter who had complained about being slammed to the floor

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