Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School

CONCLUSION: Recommendations for Effective Urban Schooling and Sound Discipline

. 163 . . CONCLUSION . Recommendations for Effective Urban Schooling and Sound Discipline Perhaps the most important insight that emerged from this study is that within the framework of zero tolerance and order maintenance , students end up getting summoned to criminal court for incidents that began with the breaking of a minor school rule, not the law. Cutting class, wearing a hat, or being disruptive did not directly lead students into the criminal-justice system; instead, the behavior that resulted in an arrest or summons often came only after the student was confronted by law-enforcement officials. Frequently, when students chose not to comply with law enforcement or attempted to explain themselves, their “disrespect” or “insubordination” was constructed as disorderly conduct and subsequently resulted in arrest or the issuance of a summons. At other times, students’ behaviors may have been considered a violation of the law or a crime (such as fighting), but many of these incidents could have been handled internally by school disciplinarians, as they often had been in the past. In either case, it became clear that aggressive policing practices and police surveillance prevailed over other types of responses to disorder and often created a flow of students into criminal court. My observations also revealed that it was not the sheer number of police –student confrontations resulting in arrest or summonses that concretized the culture of control; the culture also had much to do with the appropriation of a wide range of criminal-justice-oriented disciplinary practices and their supporting discourses. Such practices included hallway stops, sweeps, and getting threatened with a summons. Additionally, security technologies (metal detectors, cameras, and scanners) were physical manifestations of the culture of control. In the new framework, school personnel lost their traditional moral authority during disciplinary incidents and often accepted order-maintenance -style discipline not necessarily as ideal but as the norm and the 164 CONCLUSION legitimized response to disruption. Similarly, students grew accustomed to daily policing and the language associated with policing practices and prison life. In essence, I observed that, despite some resistance among school personnel, the discourses and moral rationales that support aggressive street policing and zero tolerance within the larger society had permeated the school, and it appeared that the culture of control would exist no matter how many students were actually tracked into criminal court or jail. This finding suggests a complex relationship between the school, street policing, and institutions of the criminal-justice system. In the framework I have described, students do not simply go from school to prison as police make arrests inside the school. They are instead subjected to heavy policing in various domains of their lives—in the streets, on public transportation , and in the hallways of their school—as the criminal-justice system comes to operate through civil institutions and public space. As young people accumulate summonses for minor violations of the law and school misbehavior, they grow accustomed to spending time sitting in court, and a significant number spend time in jail or prison. These once-separate domains —the school, the street (with both its logic of violence and its aggressive policing practices), and institutions of the criminal-justice system —become instantiated in each other, and the boundaries between them become blurred in students’ minds. The policing practices to which students are subjected can lead to years of routine trips to criminal court, traffic court, probation, and a night or two in jail for a series of offenses, including such behaviors as walking through a park after dark, loitering, public drinking, and jumping the subway turnstile—the kinds of behaviors in which young, unemployed men and women can easily become involved. Additionally, there is the ambiguous offense, both in school and out, of disorderly conduct. We do not fully know the impact of long-term, daily interaction with police and subjection to heavy police monitoring. On the one hand, most men and women who spend significant time in prison have prior histories of low-level offenses. On the other hand, most young people who have receivedanumberofquality -of-lifesummonsesdonotspendyearsinprison. In fact, in accordance with “criminologies of everyday life,”1 order-maintenance policing is meant to be preventive. It was designed as a cost-efficient approach to crime control that keeps the prison population down, as its goal is the reduction of major crime. Whether or not order maintenance really does prevent more serious crime has been widely debated among CONCLUSION 165 criminologists...