Crime and outrageous punishment.

Neito

Girl writes "I love you Alex" on the wall. What do you do?
1) Chide her for defacing school property.
2) Give her a detention.
3) Suspend her for 4 months, and ascribe the same punishment as one would get for threats, drug possession and assault.

HMTKSteve

That is an appropriate punishment.

Have you ever been hounded by a psycho-chick? It is not pretty...

Apreche

The general problem in a lot of schools now are these zero tolerance policies. They want to avoid lawsuits, and they avoid taking responsibility for the discipline of the students. The way they do this is they create school rules by committee, and they have written and unchanging penalties for everything. Then at any time when discipline is needed, they just defer to the written rule without taking any responsibility whatsoever. The result is that they get sued anyway because they wrote the rules stupidly. However, the school administrator will always feel like they did the right thing because they followed the rules in the book.

There have been plenty of psychological studies showing the tendency of people to ignore even their own morals when they are commanded by the voice of authority. School administrators are treating the written rules of the school as the ultimate authority, and are abandoning common sense. It's just one of the many problems in our current school system.

Page

I agree, but it seems to go further then that. The laws involving how to treat children have been getting tougher and tougher for over a century now, long before any of these troubled youths first started showing up on the radar, and though I'm sure I could find examples of homicidal youth from the past, those children tend to have really messed up pasts, where if an adult were to take the same actions they'd be acquitted on grown of their being tortured. But alas children have no true voice under the law, cause they aren't real people. I guess it all comes back to a mentality of "I brought you into this would and I can take you out of it!"

Sail

Wasn't there a "Bullshit!" episode on zero-tolerance policies?