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Before there was Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old terrorist (read: nerd) who was arrested for bringing an explosive device (read: clock) to a Texas high school, there was Joshua, the 7-year-old Napoleon of Crime who was suspended from his Maryland elementary school for chewing his Pop-Tart into a gun and pointing it at fellow students.

Before Joshua there was Patrick Agin, a Rhode Island high school senior and member in good standing of the Society for Creative Anachronism, who had to sue his school to allow a yearbook picture of him dressed in chain-mail armor and carrying a broadsword. And long before Patrick Agin rode in bureaucratic battle, there was the curious case of the unnamed eighth-grader we'll call "Midol Mary." She got booted from her school in Washington state for the unforgiveable crime of giving a non-prescription pain-relief pill to a classmate suffering menstrual cramps.

Listing the undeserving victims of zero-tolerance policies in public K-12 schools yields a genealogy as long, confusing, and endlessly multiplying as any found in the Old Testament or a late-run episode of Honey Boo-Boo. And why this is so and whether the benefits outweigh the costs are questions well worth asking.

According to Department of Education statistics, one out of five students will be suspended in a given year and another 3.4 percent will be expelled. In some states, such as Texas, over half of all students were suspended or expelled at least once during their middle-school and high school years. There is unanimous agreement that students who are thus disciplined are far more likely to not graduate high school.

Why the list of disciplined, suspended, and expelled kids approaches infinity isn't a mystery. About 75 percent of schools have zero-tolerance policies for everything from bringing guns on campus to sharing cough drops to having a bad attitude toward teachers. Kids have been bounced temporarily or permanently for bringing mouthwash to school, using paper or plastic swords in Halloween costumes, writing violent short stories, and having a pen knife with a two-inch blade in a survival kit locked away in a car parked on school grounds.

The concept of "zero tolerance" -of not allowing any level of a given substance or behavior-originated in criminology and food and drug regulations before migrating to education. In the 1960s, the Food and Drug Administration announced that certain compounds were unsafe in any concentration and wrote rules to force manufacturers to banish them from their products. In the 1970s and '80s, academics such as James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling promulgated "broken windows" theories of social order, which emphasized policing even minimal signs of lawlessness such as littering and turnstile-jumping as a way to prevent more serious problems from developing.

Throughout the modern "War on Drugs," which was declared by Richard Nixon in 1971, politicians, law enforcement, and advocacy groups have pursued ever-more exacting standards of prohibition and control of both illegal and legal drugs. For instance, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), which spearheaded the campaign in the 1980s to hold drunk drivers accountable for their behavior, now lobbies to continuously lower the legal blood-alcohol content so that it approaches zero.

Schools began implementing zero-tolerance policies, mostly in relation to drug possession, in the late 1980s, according to Russell J. Skiba in a study for the Indiana Education Policy Center. But it was the Gun-Free Schools Zone Act of 1994 that supercharged the trend by tying federal education funds to passing specific new laws.

"The law mandates a one year calendar expulsion for possession of a firearm, referral of law-violating students to the criminal or juvenile justice system, and the provision that state law must authorize the chief administrative officer of each local school district to modify such expulsions on a case-by-case basis," wrote Skiba in 2000.

Almost immediately, federal and state legislators expanded the scope of both law and practice to include an ever-growing list of objects and behaviors under zero-tolerance diktat. The Columbine High School shooting in 1999 cemented such trends in place, despite later revelations showing that virtually every known aspect of the killers' motivations, from their supposed love of violent video games to their being bullied, was completely incorrect.

Traditional schools have never been known for their celebration or nurturing of the human spirit. Indeed, decades-even centuries!-of novels, plays, movies, songs, and other forms of creative expression attest to the stultifying effect of conventional pedagogy based on a factory model borne of the Industrial Revolution. In this sense, zero-tolerance policies are nothing new. They are simply the latest way in which schools always prize order over education.

And this much seems certain: "The research findings and other data on zero tolerance suggest that these policies-which have been in force for 25 years-have no real benefit and significant adverse effects." That's from a 2013 study published by the Vera Institute of Justice, which also notes that "only five percent of serious disciplinary actions nationally in recent years involve possession of a weapon."

Schools are not safer, or more educational, because of zero-tolerance policies. They are just more arbitrary, and tougher for boys and minorities to navigate. An exhaustive study of Texas middle- and high schools found that white boys were about twice as likely to get in trouble than white girls-and that black and Hispanic boys were about 50 percent more likely to get in trouble than their white counterparts.

Here is the sad truth: The ridiculous cases filling the newspapers of kids chewing breakfast into gun-shaped pastries or giving an aspirin to a friend aren't the exception, but the rule. In practice, zero-tolerance policies are aimed at all sorts of petty, often-arbitrary annoyances that get under the skin of individual school administrators.

We spend over $12,000 a year per pupil in the nation's public K-12 system, an amount that equals tuition at most flagship state universities. Since the early 1970s, inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending has more than doubled yet the scores of graduating seniors haven't budged upwards. We tell ourselves that we send our kids to school to learn how to think in a critical, sophisticated, nuanced way and they encounter instead a system that is arbitrary, harsh, and ineffective at teaching.

That teaches kids a lesson about the world, but it's well short of the education they deserve.

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Before there was Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old terrorist (read: nerd) who was arrested for bringing an explosive device (read: clock) to a Texas high school, there was Joshua, the 7-year-old Napoleon of Crime who was suspended from his Maryland elementary school for chewing his Pop-Tart into a gun and pointing it at fellow students.

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/policing-the-police-in-newark

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https://www.thoughtco.com/school-to-prison-pipeline-4136170

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https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/sentencing-laws-and-how-they-contribute-mass-incarceration-0

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What factors decide how long someone spends in prison? The answer is, it's complicated. If you care about criminal justice reform, the technical nature of sentencing makes it hard to understand the laws that determine the length of someone's prison term - and even harder to understand how those laws might be creating unjust outcomes.

Here, we explain a few of the most common terms you're likely to hear in any debate around sentencing. We also give simple, clear-cut explanations of how, based on our research, those laws contribute to mass incarceration. There's a lot more to know about sentencing law and policy. But this will give you a good start so you can join the conversation.
Mandatory minimums
A lot of the debate on criminal justice reform focuses on mandatory minimums. What are they and why do people - including us - think they're unfair?

Simply put, anyone convicted of a crime under a "mandatory minimum" gets at least that sentence. The goal of these laws when they were developed was to promote uniformity; it doesn't matter how strict or lenient your judge is, as the law and the law alone determines the sentence you receive.

Regrettably, the adoption of mandatory minimums has not led to a fairer system. In fact, it's had the opposite effect. By tying judges' hands, mandatory minimums effectively took power away from judges and gave it to prosecutors, who could threaten to charge defendants with crimes that would "trigger" a mandatory minimum. Facing a harsh sentence from which there's no other escape, a defendant can often feel coerced into admitting their guilt - even sometimes falsely confessing.

Interestingly, federal judges have come to dislike mandatory minimums, especially in drug cases. Mandatory minimums often apply to nonviolent drug offenders, forcing judges to harshly punish those who pose the least physical danger to communities. While the goal of mandatory minimums may have been fairness, they've instead caused an imbalance in the courtroom that has helped drive mass incarceration.

While mandatory minimums have been in place in some states since the 1950s, their use grew after the 1984 Sentencing Reform Act, which added significant mandatory minimums for many federal crimes and abolished federal parole. States followed, and soon mandatory minimums became a standard response to drug epidemics and crime spikes. What started as a well-intentioned attempt to impose uniformity became too restrictive, creating new disparities and injustices in the process.
Three-strikes laws
"Three-strikes" laws are another way legislatures have removed sentencing discretion that judges used to have. Under these laws, which started in California, a person is considered to be beyond rehabilitation after committing three crimes. As a result, once they've reached the "third strike," the penalty is much more severe than it would usually be. Sometimes a life sentence can result from a combination of relatively minor offenses, just because the third strike requires the judge to impose a very long prison sentence. There are people today spending their lives in prison for committing three petty crimes.

These punishments are inhumane and nonsensical, even from a public safety perspective. It costs money to keep people in prison, so a three-strikes law can result in the government spending $500,000 to incarcerate someone for committing three $500 crimes.

And it's unclear whether these laws even have the desired effect. The theory is that if someone knows they'll face a serious punishment for their third offense, they won't commit it - or won't even commit their first offense. But it's been shown that that's not how people think, and it's definitely not how people think about crime. In technical terms that means it's unclear whether three-strikes laws have the desired " deterrent effect."
Truth-in-sentencing laws
If you're sentenced to "10 years in prison," you generally don't spend 10 years in prison. That's because the federal system - and most states - let people earn time off their sentence for "good behavior," creating an incentive for people to improve themselves and turn away from crime while in prison. People also become eligible for parole, a type of early release after which a former inmate continues to be supervised by government officials. But parole has to be earned - again, giving people a reason to spend their time behind bars productively, on education or work programs.

"Truth-in-sentencing laws" eliminate those opportunities for early release, requiring people to serve (for example) 75 percent of their prison term physically behind bars. The goal is to ensure that the sentence the judge imposes is what a person will actually serve in prison - in other words, "what you see is what you get."

That may seem like a reasonable goal, but eliminating early release options actually gives people less of an incentive to comply with prison rules or take advantage of education or training opportunities. It also means that there's no way around prison sentences that are already too long.
Different sentences for different drugs
Generally, possessing 5 grams of marijuana will earn you less prison time than possessing 5 grams of cocaine. The idea is that more dangerous drugs should be punished more severely. But that hasn't always been the case. Crack and powder cocaine are chemically the same substance. But possession of crack cocaine, which is more common in communities of color, is punished much more severely than possession of powder cocaine, which is more common in wealthier white communities. While somewhat reduced, this disparity remains, even after the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.
What can be done?
Now that you've learned about some of the more controversial sentencing decisions of the last 30 years, you can join the conversation about how to fix them. There are ways to restore fairness to criminal sentencing and help end mass incarceration in the process. You can read about them here and find the Brennan Center's detailed analysis of how 40 percent of American prisoners are behind bars without any public safety justification here.

(Image: Shutterstock.com)

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Sentencing Laws and How They Contribute to Mass Incarceration

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What factors decide how long someone spends in prison? The answer is, it's complicated. If you care about criminal justice reform, the technical nature of sentencing makes it hard to understand the laws that determine the length of someone's prison term - and even harder to understand how those laws might be creating unjust outcomes.

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Baltimore police officer resigns after being filmed beating man

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The American prison system is massive. So massive that its estimated turnover of $74 billion eclipses the GDP of 133 nations. What is perhaps most unsettling about this fun fact is that it is the American taxpayer who foots the bill and is increasingly padding the pockets of publicly traded corporations like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group. Combined both companies generated over $2.53 billion in revenue in 2012, and represent more than half of the private prison business. So what exactly makes the business of incarcerating Americans so lucrative?
Find out now: Can I afford my student loan payments?
The American Prison System

Most of it has to do with the way the American legal system works and how it has changed over the last 40 years. In the 1970's, lawmakers were dealing with a nationwide rash of drug-use and crime. By declaring a nation-wide war on drugs in 1971, President Richard Nixon set a precedent for hard-line policies towards drug-related crime.

New York governor Nelson Rockefeller followed suit declaring "For drug pushing, life sentence, no parole, no probation." His policies once put into action promised 15 years to life in prison for drug users and dealers. His policies catalyzed the growth of a colossal corrections system that currently houses an estimated 2.2 million inmates.

The runaway growth of US corrections did not come overnight, and did not come from the government alone. Since the 1970's federal and state correction agencies have consistently struggled to meet the increased demands brought on by the US Department of Justice and strict drug laws.

In 1982, three Texas businessmen, Tom Beasley, John Ferguson, and Don Hutto saw an opportunity in the shortcomings of the Texas corrections system's inability to deal with this influx of incarcerations. They devised and executed a plan to secure the first government contract to design, build, and operate a corrections facility from the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Texas Department of Justice.

Contract in hand, the trio was given 90 days to open a detention center for undocumented aliens. As their January 28 deadline neared, Hutto, Ferguson, and Beasley had no facility, no staff and their experiment seemed doomed to fail.

On New Year's Eve, 1983, Beasley decided to get crafty, "Well, we'll just go to Houston and find a place," he reportedly told Ferguson. Incredulous, Ferguson replied, "Tom, you're crazy. There's no possible way. This is New Year's Day. There is no possible way we can find a place today." Beasley simply responded, "We have to."

The three men immediately got on a plane and began their search. After a litany of rejections they came upon the Olympic Motel at 1am on New Year's Day and immediately began negotiations that lasted for three days.

After hiring the motel owner's family and promising to return the motel to its original condition, the group was in business. They then converted all of the motel rooms to secure cells, procured secure transportation and opened shop on January 28, 1983 when 87 inmates were brought in. Hutto, Ferguson and Beasley formed Corrections Corporation of America, the largest prison private prison network in the United States.

With the precedent it set with the first private detention center, CCA changed the face of US corrections for good. The private sector came to be seen as a quick-fix to the problem of overcrowded, understaffed public prisons. Today, privatized prisons make up over 10% of the corrections market-turning over $7.4 billion per year.

The American Prison Business

The average cost of incarcerating an American prisoner varies from state to state. Some states, like Indiana have managed to keep prices low at around $14,000 per inmate. While states like New York pay around $60,000 to keep its citizens behind bars. The costs of running the American prison system is expensive and has become increasingly so despite public opposition.
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According to a 2012 Vera Institute of Justice study, the number of those incarcerated has increased by over 700% over the last four decades. The cost to the taxpayer? $39 billion.

Where is all of this money going? The Vera institute study contends that many corrections-related costs, such as employee benefits and taxes, pension contributions, retiree health care contributions, legal judgments and claims are deemed central administrative costs.

Moreover, many states fund inmate services-such as hospital care in 8 states, and education and training in 12 states-outside of their corrections departments. It's a nice accounting trick but this amounts to a $5.4 billion gap between the reported corrections budgets of the 40 states examined by the study-$33.5 billion-and the actual cost to taxpayer of $39 billion.

The ideology behind this peculiar industry is that private companies, forced to compete with state government prices and one another for contracts, can provide correctional services more efficiently than the government itself can. Moreover, these private companies offer a correctional solution that prevents the government from having to sink capital into the brick-and-mortar of new prisons and other long term costs such as pensions, salaries, and health-care for new prison staff.

Private prisons like CCA not only provide states and the federal government with lower "per-diem" costs, but they also provide a means for them to balance their budgets by buying off and refurbishing state-owned prisons.
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The best corrections corporation in America

CCA operates the fifth largest prison system, public or private, in the system in the US. Under its control include 51 owned-and-operated facilities in 16 states and contracted management of 18 more state-owned facilities in 7 states. This network allows CCA to maintain a 44% stake in the $7.4 billion private corrections market for a market cap of $3.53 billion. All of this equates to a massively profitable operation for CCA who recorded $1.64 billion in revenue, $883.1 million of which came from state governments in 2012.

Studies mostly agree that privatized prisons save money on the balance sheet-with short run savings averaging about 19.25% and long run savings averaging about 28.82%. In fact, many states have statutes that require a certain percentage of savings- Florida 7%, Texas 10%, Kentucky 10%, Mississippi 10% -in contracts with private corrections providers. On paper, private corrections facilities are almost always more efficient than public ones. CCA reports savings of 68-74% vs. various government agencies for 1 000 new beds added. Astonishingly, CCA was able to generate these savings while also recording a 29.6% operating margin of $17.53 per man, per day in 2012. Are private prisons really that much more efficient or are we missing something?

Let's break this down further. In 2012 CCA received $59.14 in revenue per compensated man-day from the government. Of this $59.14, CCA committed $41.61 to operating expenses per man-day. This effectively means CCA commits $41.61 to each prisoner each day. According to CCA's SEC filings 65% of these operating expenses, or $27.05 goes to employee salaries and benefits. This leaves $14.56 per man-day for the combined costs of food, medical care, and contracted drug rehabilitation and education programs.

Considering that this is the area private prisons choose to cut costs, it is little wonder they come with hidden costs unaccounted for by their reported savings. For instance, a study on recidivism performed in Oklahoma between 1997 and 2008 showed that prisoners released from private prisons had almost a 4% higher rate of recidivism (returning to prison). This means, that for every 1000 prisoners released, private prisons have the additional annual cost to the Oklahoma taxpayer of $554,010 (based on average annual cost per inmate). If you extrapolate this recidivism gap to a state like New Jersey that spends more per prisoner, the hidden cost of releasing 1000 inmates jumps to $1,645,950.
Related Article: Four People Who Single-Handedly Caused Economic Crises
Private problems become public issues

In recent years, private prisons have also come under fire for failing to successfully fulfill their contracts. In 2010 alone, US private prisons were the subject of four major scandals. An Arizona prison operated by the Management and Training Corporation allowed three inmates-two convicted of murder and one convicted of attempted murder-to escape. Before being captured the escapees murdered a couple in New Mexico. The family filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit against MTC and the state of Arizona.

In 2010, a nationally released video showed an inmate at the Idaho Correctional Center thrown to the ground, beaten, and kicked. ICC guards made no attempt to intervene, and were later charged with "routinely failing to protect inmates" and deliberately exposing inmates to "prison gangs and violent culture." In Kentucky, a sex scandal involving female prisoners and guards forced a CCA prison to relocate several hundred women 377 miles away to a state-run prison. Also in 2010, the GEO group was forced to reach a $2.9 million settlement to provide up to $400 to inmates at six facilities for illegal and unnecessary strip searches.

Incidents such as these occur frequently and the money doled out by private prisons, and the government in lawsuits, retributions, and relocation are is not reflected in the per-diem costs cited by private companies to highlight savings. When one considers the $156,800,000 net income of a company like CCA, it becomes easy to understand why such incidents occur. Operators of private prisons are given a sum in government contract. It is their duty to then carry out the terms and provide the conditions specified in the contract.

As it turns out the best way to turn a profit from this sum is to strive for the absolute minimum requirements that these contracts allow. By slashing costs related to crucial aspects of operating facilities such as training and hiring of personnel and maintaining safe facilities companies like CCA turn a greater profit for their shareholders and create more enticing cost-reduction statistics to draw in more government contracts.

Furthermore, the statistics used to measure the success of all prisons in cutting costs-usually total taxpayer cost per inmate-are generally considered to be unreliable in assessing real cost. These same statistics are often used to validate private contracting of corrections operations. In today's fiscally anxious political climate, government officials and private prison employees are hyper-aware of the impact of these statistics on measuring success of budget slashing strategies. They are often incentivized to bring down these numbers and employ several strategies that skew cost statistics to make them more palatable to the taxpayer.

The Vera Institute study identifies several factors that tend to these alter cost-per-prisoner numbers. The first is overcrowding of prisons. By overcrowding prisons and allowing the inmate population to exceed the capacity of a facility, the price-per-inmate figure of that facility is driven downward at the cost of safety, reliability, and increased recidivism. States and private prisons with greater incarceration of low-level offenders will also report lower per-prisoner costs though their total cost to the tax payer is actually greater.

Low-level offenders can be placed in minimum and medium security prisons which require fewer staff, and generally have much lower incarceration costs. Therefore, by incarcerating a greater number of persons who commit less-serious offenses, corrections systems can present themselves as more efficient despite the increase in total cost they create. Finally, state corrections systems often reimburse local jails to house state-sentenced offenders. These costs are often set by statute and not updated in accordance with rising costs.

The cost of corrections to the American taxpayer

So what does all of this mean for American citizens. Let's take a look at Joe Taxpayer from Arizona to see what it costs to run and maintain American prisons. Joe is a pretty average guy, a single man making a living in Scottsdale. The state of Arizona allocates just over 10% of its budget to corrections each year in the name of public safety. Joe, who works as a middle school principal, brings home $75,000 a year and pays $2,309 annually in state taxes.

Some simple math reveals that Joe pays $230.90 every year towards the incarceration, monitoring and rehabilitation of prisoners. Now, 13% (and growing) of Arizona's prisoners are housed and managed by private corrections facilities. If Arizona is spending equally on private and public prisoners Joe is giving $30 every year to private corporations to house prisoners.

If we account for the savings offered by Arizona prisons, reconciling the -1.0% of medium security prisons and 8.0% savings to 7.0% for the sake of simplicity, Joe forks over a final sum somewhere around $28 for the services of private prisons every year out of his state taxes alone. Joe Taxpayer is not pleased.

The business of prisons is deeply intertwined with a number of issues ranging from accounting shady accounting practices, to recidivism and other hidden social costs. However it is difficult to discern whether private prisons are a better use of taxpayer dollars especially if they serve government interests ahead of civil liberties and transparency.

What is abundantly clear is that prisons system is a lucrative business for those uniquely positioned to service the growing needs of the federal and state judicial systems.
Related Article: The Economics of Electronic Dance Music Festivals
Update: If you have questions beyond the economics of the prison system, SmartAsset can help. So many people reached out to us saying they wanted help with financial planning, that we built a tool to match you with a financial advisor who can meet your needs. First you answer a series of questions about your situation and your goals. Then the program narrows down thousands of advisors to three fiduciaries who meet your needs. You can read their profiles to learn more about them, interview them on the phone or in person and choose who to work with in the future. This allows you to find a good fit while doing much of the hard work for you.
Sources: CCA, Vera Institute of Justice, The Nation, AFSC, CJR, University of Chicago Crime Lab, Barclays Capital, NPR, AFSC Photo Credit: CCA.com, The New York Times, KQED.org

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The Economics of the American Prison System | SmartAsset

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The American prison system is massive. So massive that its estimated turnover of $74 billion eclipses the GDP of 133 nations. What is perhaps most unsettling about this fun fact is that it is the American taxpayer who foots the bill and is increasingly padding the pockets of publicly traded corporations like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group.

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https://youtu.be/y7dHqbYlIx0

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Policing the Police: The Copwatch Movement

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In the aftermath of Ferguson, a group of concerned citizens have dedicated themselves to recording the police every chance they get.

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https://www.aclutx.org/en/know-your-rights/your-right-film-police

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We aren't believed, but they openly lied about this.

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Video shows Chicago police hitting student

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/1586161/private-prisons-make-big-profits-from-ice/amp/

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https://archive.attn.com/stories/941/who-profits-from-prisoners

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How Law Enforcement Employs Social Media Monitoring Tools

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How Law Enforcement Employs Social Media Monitoring Tools

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https://www.thebalancecareers.com/social-networking-and-law-enforcement-974548

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/New-Video-Shows-Cops-Started-Violent-Altercation-With-Student-Attorney-Says-508468561.html%3famp=y

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Police Officer Slams S.C. High School Student to the Ground

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https://www.aclu.org/other/cracks-system-20-years-unjust-federal-crack-cocaine-law

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Mandatory minimums on mainly drug offenses 

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Mandatory minimums on mainly drug offenses 

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https://www.cjpf.org/mandatory-minimums

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.seventeen.com/fashion/news/amp33448/students-protest-sexist-dress-code-that-targets-girls-exposed-shoulders/

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https://www.theodysseyonline.com/14-year-old-boy-arrested-for-science-project

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Texas Laws & Penalties - NORML - Working to Reform Marijuana Laws

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When someone is convicted of an offense punishable by a mandatory minimum sentence, the judge must sentence the defendant to the mandatory minimum sentence or to a higher sentence. The judge has no power to sentence the defendant to less time than the mandatory minimum.

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Woman arrested for voting while on probation

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Woman arrested for voting while on probation

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/03/30/texas-woman-sentenced-to-5-years-in-prison-for-voting-while-on-probation/?utm_term=.4b141be2202e

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zero tolerance contribution to the pipeline 

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zero tolerance contribution to the pipeline 

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https://phys.org/news/2019-02-tolerance-policies-common-america-schools.html

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/theweek.com/articles-amp/788226/private-prison-industry-explained

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5 things to consider before posting cops in school 

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5 things to consider before posting cops in school 

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https://cops.usdoj.gov/html/dispatch/02-2018/cops_in_schools.html

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KATY -- Bubbly and bright, Jewel Caillet considered herself "Miss Teen Spirit" until she was accused of drinking at a high school football game and subjected to 3 1/2 months in the Katy Independent School District's discipline school.

The 16-year-old says she was not drinking and was refused the opportunity to take a Breathalyzer test. A municipal court judge threw out the charge. But KISD still sent Jewel to the discipline school, where students cannot have a locker or pens because they could be used to hide drugs. Each day, Jewel was required to bare her midriff, ankles and feet for inspections to ensure she was not carrying contraband.

Stories like hers have become increasingly common.

As schools across the nation have attempted to crack down on violence and danger since the Columbine school shootings five years ago, they also have increased the number of offenses for which children can be sent to discipline schools, suspended, expelled, ticketed or even arrested.

A growing body of evidence suggests that these efforts have gone too far. Parents, some educators, and Republican and Democratic lawmakers are increasingly concerned that children are attending school in a police state.

Students routinely submit to being searched for drugs and weapons. In one surprise drug search last November, 14 police officers in Goose Creek, S.C., rushed into a high school, several with their guns drawn. They forced students to the ground and handcuffed several of them but found no drugs.

As school districts enforce local and state "zero tolerance" policies, stories of children being suspended for taking butter knives and nail files to school have become commonplace.

A wave of fear swept the nation after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 of their Littleton, Colo., classmates, a teacher and themselves on April 20, 1999. The zeal for safety, though, extended beyond harsher penalties for bringing weapons to school to punishments for minor offenses such as talking back and being in the hallway during class.

In Katy school s, throwing food, carrying a pager and having a skateboard are all listed in the student code of conduct as offenses that can warrant calling in the police. So far this school year, KISD police have ticketed or arrested students in 4,298 cases. Twenty-one percent of the infractions were classified as disorderly conduct, disruption or assault, the last of which includes anything from a shove to physically injuring someone.

The Houston Independent School District, with five times as many students, has issued 1,200 fewer citations this school year than Katy. KISD has ticketed or arrested one student for every nine in the school district, while HISD has cited one of every 68 students.

Texas law requires zero tolerance for offenses including selling drugs and alcohol, having a firearm and committing aggravated assault, arson, murder and other felonies.

Some educators think zero-tolerance policies and an increased police presence on campus are necessary for keeping classrooms safe. Others worry that the early introductions to the legal system will put more children on a "school-to-prison pipeline."

Numerous educational, legal and civil rights organizations complain that among other things, zero-tolerance policies disproportionately punish children with disabilities, blacks and Hispanics.

They also worry that too many children are expelled, making it unlikely that they will learn to be productive members of society. In the Houston area, expelled students enter the juvenile justice system. Such programs do not exist in rural parts of Texas or much of the nation.

In Katy, the kind of upper-middle-class suburb that draws parents seeking better schools for their children, drug dogs, metal detectors and children in police handcuffs once would have been unthinkable.

Now such things are so prevalent that a group of parents have organized a Web site ( www.katyzerotolerance.com) to protest what they consider over-the-top discipline.

"It's a reaction to Columbine gone bad," said Fred Hink, a Katy parent who is running for a school board seat to fight the policy. "I challenge them to show how these policies are actually making schools safer."

Katy school officials argue that the discipline policy is applied compassionately and that police are called only when legally required, even though the policy lists activities that would not seem to be crimes. School administrators acknowledge that they do not hold a standard of innocent until proven guilty for school-administered discipline, but they say they "make every effort" to find out whether students did what they are accused of doing.

"The intent of our policy is to create a learning environment," KISD spokesman Steve Stanford said. "If a kid flicked a french fry at another kid, you're not going to call the police."

Debbie Ratcliffe, spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency, cautioned that calls to police for minor infractions could get a school designated as "persistently dangerous." That would allow students to transfer out of the school, taking a chunk of money with them.

"Many schools handle minor infractions through a visit to the school principal's office, rather than a call to police," she said.

Parents in Katy cannot appeal decisions to send their children to the discipline school for periods of 60 days or fewer. District officials say the children who go through the school, named Opportunity Awareness Center, have access to better resources, including small classes, counselors and social workers.

"They leave here better for it," said Patty Bing, principal of the discipline school. "I've never seen a situation where a child did not benefit."

But students have nicknamed the Opportunity Awareness Center "A-School" because the classes are so easy.

Jewel, now back at Taylor High School, has a harsher assessment.

"At A-School, you knew you were in prison," she said, adding that the experience made her hate school even at Taylor.

The entrance to the discipline school is monitored by a security guard and blocked by a metal detector, where the students line up every morning to be searched before they can enter. Bing and other faculty members greet the students as they lift up their shirts and pants, empty their pockets and take off their shoes.

"We make it a very positive experience to start the day," the principal said.

The school is cheerfully decorated, filled with signs bearing such bromides as, "Smile and the world smiles back." The students, most in classes of fewer than 10, seem typical: some smiling and participating, others staring sullenly at their desks.

The school offers basics, such as math, science and English, and a few electives but no advanced classes or foreign languages. It is considering offering a Spanish class next year.

"We are not required by law to provide any of the advanced-placement classes" in the discipline school, said Bonnie Holland, executive assistant to the KISD superintendent. "Our off-campus DAEP (discipline alternative education program) is as good as anybody's."

Jewel's mother, Sandra Caillet, said her daughter learned nothing at the discipline school but how to get into trouble.

"They learn where the drugs are and who's selling them," Caillet said.

An array of critics complain that it is time to do away with rigid discipline policies.

"I have not been a fan of zero tolerance because it implies or requires zero thinking," said state Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston. "If we have adults who can't apply discipline in a reasonable fashion, then we've got problems with the adults, not with the children."

State Sen. Jon Lindsay, R-Houston, tried unsuccessfully during the 2003 Legislature to remove the zero-tolerance requirements from state law. He plans to try again next year.

"Some of the administrators didn't want to have that discretion," he said. "They liked the idea of just having a rigid guideline with no discretion offered to them."

KISD's Stanford said a benefit of the regimented discipline policy in Katy is that it prevents administrators from over- and under-punishing students.

"Common sense is a relative term," he said.

The Houston Federation of Teachers supports zero-tolerance policies, complaining only that principals do not adequately enforce them.

"It makes the schools safer," HFT spokeswoman Joanna Pasternak said. "It allows the teachers to teach."

Special education students and blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately caught up in the discipline system, in the Katy district and in Texas as a whole, Texas Education Agency statistics show.

Experts are particularly concerned that disabled children are being ticketed and arrested more than others, though the TEA does not keep track of how many tickets are written.

But Kay Lambert, an education policy specialist with Advocacy Inc., a federally funded nonprofit group formed to protect the rights of people with disabilities in Texas, has received complaints from many parents whose mentally retarded and autistic children have been ticketed in the schools.

Katy parent Mary Jane Williams told the Chronicle that her autistic child was taken to court after acting out. She said children with disabilities need help, not punishment.

"They're carted off, and they're having charges filed against them," Lambert said, echoing the parents' concern that discipline only terrifies these children.

Mark Soler, president of the Youth Law Center, a Washington-based law firm that works on child-welfare and juvenile justice system issues, co-authored a report criticizing zero-tolerance policies.

"We are very concerned that teachers in school are acting differently to African-American kids than to white kids," said Soler, who spent a year studying the implementation of discipline policies in Kentucky schools. "They may be more fearful of African-American kids."

Soler also found that weapons and drugs made up few of the infractions in the Kentucky study. Instead, most suspensions and expulsions were for minor offenses, such as talking back or skipping school.

"If you kick them out of school, you put them on this school-to-prison pipeline," Soler said. "We want to keep these children in our schools so they can get jobs, they can support families and they can be productive members of our communities."

Though Katy students who misbehave go to the in-district discipline school or the juvenile justice system instead of the streets, parents still worry the effect will be damaging.

"They're going to turn off, and they're going to stop listening to teachers," Hink said. "They are going to underperform in society."

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Katy ISD's zero tolerance policy alarms parents

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Bubbly and bright, Jewel Caillet considered herself "Miss Teen Spirit" until she was accused of drinking at a high school football game and subjected to 3 1/2 months in the Katy Independent School District's discipline school. Parents, some educators, and Republican and Democratic lawmakers are increasingly concerned that children are attending school in a police state.

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