I think that this trend, at least in part, has been influenced by a change in the way that we treat adolescent crime. For example, even when I was a kid (early 90's) you would not get arrested for getting into a fist fight at school. Nowadays, bam; call the cops.
Get caught with some pot? Arrested. Get caught performing some petty vandalization? Arrested. Get caught at a party drinking as a minor? Arrested. We arrest kids for things that they used to just get a slap on the wrist/call to mom & dad for. Now they get a court date.
We throw the cuffs on kids much more readily than we used to 20, 30, 40+ years ago.
This has been dubbed the "school-to-prison pipeline." It's exacerbated by the fact that many schools now have police officers permanently stationed at the school, which leads to a "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem. It also contributes to the racial disparity because predominantly black schools are more likely to have a police officer than predominantly white schools.
This was a sensitive topic while I was in high school in Colorado. I don't think the school had a majority, but the largest groups were white and hispanic groups. We always had at least 1 permanent police officer heading a group of a couple of people who could be either police or security.
Nominally this was a response to incidents throughout the rest of the state such as Columbine, but in reality the purpose was to try to combat youth gangs. In this respect I think it partially worked for the circumstances.
However, this was also used to target usage of marijuana and cigarettes by students. I'm not sure how effective this was, because data about that was not commonly released by the school. Needless to say, a lot of students didn't like this, but opinion of the student body was very divided. It would be interesting to see how things have changed in Colorado high schools since marijuana was legalized; I'll have to look into that, but in most schools marijuana is still banned (like tobacco products) so things could only get worse if school policy is unchanged.
As an outsider that seems incredibly wrong. The answer to youth gangs is not more security. Perform a root cause analysis and go back to the fact that kids often fall into gangs because parents are not around (working double jobs), they are stuck in poverty with an easy out (crime).
It saddens me to read about solving youth problems by attacking the symptoms rather than the cause. Though I understand why, fixing the cause takes time, is unpopular to those on the political right, while fixing the symptom seems can achieve immediate results (though not long term).
Your analysis certainly has merits. I think that that is why a lot of schools throughout Denver are still struggling. My own high school saw better results though, largely because it has an excellent administration which realized that improving the overall environment of the school was key.
To tackle the problem of gangs around school, there were a couple of important changes our last principal initiated, that other schools in the area did not necessarily pick up on. 1) Strictly enforce a ban on certain types of clothing that were being used to display allegiance to given gangs. 2) Increase the amount of open spaces for students to stay in while not in classes. 3) Require that students show up to school each morning, even if they do not have classes that morning. 4)Encourage students to stay inside during school hours, even when they have off blocks. 5) Have police/security officers at school introduce themselves to students, and engage students in conversation to get to know them.
On the whole the principal was very engaging so it was thanks to these programs that the gang problem was not as bad when I left compared to when I entered. In this case the heightened role of security was leveraged to have some positive effects, something not seen at other schools where there is a fundamental lack of trust between students and security. Trust and positive engagement are key, but achieving that is difficult.
Honestly, I'm not sure that police involvement for this stuff is a bad thing.
Schools are no longer equipped to handle violence between students, and it's questionable whether they ever were. They've lost many disciplinary tools they could use to deal with violent students, and even then it's hard to say that schools properly handled bullying or other student-on-student violence issues back in the "good old days".
Bringing in the police to handle those kinds of issues might actually be the appropriate response. Pulling out an arrest for it though seems excessive.
>Honestly, I'm not sure that police involvement for this stuff is a bad thing. Schools are no longer equipped to handle violence between students, and it's questionable whether they ever were.
I don't know, they are perfecty fine to "handle violence between students" in Western Europe, and without metal detectors and police on site.
Perhaps it's time for the society to recheck it's course, instead of throwing jail time at the problem?
I don't agree. School in Western Europe can be a horrifying experience where the only solution is that the person being beaten up transfers to another school. Nothing is done about the people beating.
Emphasis on can. Of course it can, there is always outliers and there is nothing that can be done about that. However I would guess that in the majority of cases people beating do get handled. I am just guessing. Are you just guessing too or do you have some hard evidence or statistics to back your claim?
Where I'm from people doing the beatings would get warnings, detention, special class and consultation, or as a last resort youth detention center ("prison" for kids with focus on rehabilitation) in that order. Sure, you could also move schools but this seems more to have been a decision taken by parents and not the school system itself.
I don't know. I went to school there, and there was absolutely zero (or 0.01% cases) of beating I'm aware of. In a whole region of 130.000 people.
Perhaps that's the case in some down and out regions in England or France, with rampant poverty and ex-industrial towns/suburbs (think Detroit).
But not in the majority of Western Europe. Some guys getting into a fight, sure. But beatings are not an occurance in schools, the same way guns aren't.
That could be taken as an argument that police intervention in schoolyard violence works.
My point isn't that schools are more violent, but that we're correctly identifying that managing school violence is not part of the teacher role, and simply ignoring it as "boys will be boys" isn't good either.
While violence may not be a part of the teacher role, education certainly is. And that sounds like the kind of social education that is an extension of what family should be providing. I'm wary of sending policemen to school, just the same as I'd be wary of sending policemen to families ("violence is not part of the parent role").
The "more cops deployed in schools" thing lagged the preference for police intervention and legal charges for school-site crimes that previously might have been handled informally (deploying cops to schools was a response to the fact that the cops were being called to schools more often.)
So if it was the change in disciplinary approach that drove the decrease in violent crime, its quite possible that effect would somewhat precede the increase in police deployments in schools.
I understand that this is also partly due to legal liability issues. Nowadays, due to civil suits, schools often have little effective way to discipline the uncooperative students besides calling the police. When any potential physical contact can result in an expensive lawsuit, or maybe even sexual harassment/molestation accusations, they tend to play it safe and dial 911.
> I think that this trend, at least in part, has been influenced by a change in the way that we treat adolescent crime. For example, even when I was a kid (early 90's) you would not get arrested for getting into a fist fight at school. Nowadays, bam; call the cops.
Well, the people in this study were born in the early 80s. So I'm not sure any modern shifts that you point to are the distinctive factor.
No, they were 18 between 1997 and 2008, so they were *born in the between 1979 and 1990, i.e., they were teenagers in the 90's or early 00's, same age as me (DOB 1983).
"The study is an analysis of national survey data from 1997 to 2008 of teenagers and young adults, ages 18"
I guess we had different ideas of kids. This data is based on NLSY97, meaning the subjects were born between 1981 and 1985. [1]
Still, doesn't that contradict your point about these results being based on a substantial difference from when you were a kid? As you point out, this study is based on exactly your cohort. Thus it's not a matter of policies nowadays leading to 40% arrest rates. That figure is based directly on the policies of the 90s.
90's and 00's, yes, but it's become even more extreme. I was arrested a couple of times as a teenager, but if I had done half the things as a teen now that I did back then I would probably have spent my formative years in juvie.
I'm just saying, the trend is there. More and more kids get arrested for what I would argue is petty stuff that most kids do.
They can really arrested you for drinking as a minor? In here a bar can get into trouble if they sell you a drink, but your only trouble are parents if they ever find out. And I remember that 18-19 years old Americans I knew indeed used to drink (and get wasted too).
As always in the U.S., it depends on the state and city where you live. But I'm pretty positive there are cities where it's actually illegal for a person to be drinking underage. Knowing some of our cities, mere possession of an open container by itself might be enough.
However as you note, that hasn't really stopped teenage drinking...
It's worse than that - entire states have adopted the concept of a minor in possession by consumption - if a minor is behaving in a way that leads police to believe they are intoxicated, that is enough to charge them with being in possession of alcohol.
When I was in college, some dorm buddies of mine got caught drinking on a public beach at night, were arrested, and charged with "minor in possession." I'm pretty sure this was a state law, and I'd be surprised if it wasn't widespread.
Get caught with some pot? Arrested. Get caught performing some petty vandalization? Arrested. Get caught at a party drinking as a minor? Arrested. We arrest kids for things that they used to just get a slap on the wrist/call to mom & dad for. Now they get a court date.
We throw the cuffs on kids much more readily than we used to 20, 30, 40+ years ago.