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Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

My personal experience is no exceptions to the rules means massive petty corruption. He's a mostly good white kid; don't look at the contents of his "cigarette" too closely. I'm not going to look in your backpack because I don't particularly want to have to have you arrested, but god help you if I ever have to talk to you again about smelling beer on your breath...

This is usually the hidden story behind draconian enforcement. The kid didn't get busted for having a tablet of tylenol, she got busted using tylenol as a weapon for disrespecting a teacher, being the wrong race (not necessarily black, in some schools white is the wrong race), etc. The real purpose is if everyone is inherently a criminal all the time, then everyone can be punished as much as any tin pot dictator desires at any time. That's the true purpose of the rule. Or the true educational lesson for the kids.

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Of course it's hard to tell if allowing arbitrary exceptions also allows the same kind of problem. "I'll give you a warning because [you're white and] you're normally a good kid and one mistake shouldn't ruin your education"

> Of course it's hard to tell if allowing arbitrary exceptions also allows the same kind of problem.

As illustrated above, there are always arbitrary exceptions, because the people can informally let kids off the hook. The problem is that the punishments are so high. Why can't zero tolerance use less drastic punishments?

"Why can't zero tolerance use less drastic punishments?"

You seem not to have read my post. The reason it exists is to allow the arbitrary destruction of kids lives, preferentially as a weapon against minorities, undesirables, the poor, often all of the above. You're treating the primary purpose of that feature as if its a bug. Like asking why the "rm" command takes the drastic effect of deleting files.

For example, one reason why it might exist is so if a teacher gets called a bitch, the cops would laugh at a teacher who tried to report that as assault, but if the teacher can label a girl as a drug dealer and get her expelled and prevent her from graduating or getting on the middle class treadmill in general, because of the girl's monthly cycle and some advil in her purse, well, we'll see who's the dominant primate and who gets the last laugh in that argument. Its NOT a bug its an intentionally inhumane feature, correctly implemented.

Its possible to do a really efficient and effective job of being evil. I don't really know how to rephrase it more clearly? Its like the anti-google motto or something?

> You seem not to have read my post. The reason it exists is to allow the arbitrary destruction of kids lives, preferentially as a weapon against minorities, undesirables, the poor, often all of the above. You're treating the primary purpose of that feature as if its a bug.

I didn't respond to your post. But you are wrong about the reason "it" exists. The school administrators that create the zero tolerance policies are usually not the same people that are on the ground enforcing the policies. It might be used as a weapon by the teachers on the ground, but they aren't the ones creating the policies.

I agree. The general mechanism is to push "control" of the situation and the punishment outside of the actual agents who are enacting punishment: under "zero-tolerance", it is no longer the arbitrary agency of the teachers and administration, but laws that "force" them to take these actions.

In situations where there is no "zero tolerance", there are still arbitrary and gross executions of power, but the agency behind this power can at least be (more) clearly traced to the actors behind it.

In many ways, teachers are people who never grew up past high school. They can't wait to go back and do it all again, but as the ultimate popular kid.

Yeah. I landed on the privileged end of this. I think my white privilege saved my ass in highschool.

Being the sort of "exceptional" kid that people like @will_brown talks about helping saved my ass on numerous occasions. In the post-Columbine crackdowns in schools, I use to come and leave highschool as I pleased. The administration was terrified of doing anything to 'gifted' kids because a few years earlier the parents of a gifted kid got a lawyer and apparently gave them quite a scare. I probably spend less than 25% of my senior year actually in the classes I was suppose to be in, spending the rest of the time either playing quake under the pretense of "gifted seminar", or knocking around town under the pretense of taking college classes. Had I been a 'regular' kid, I would have surely been expelled.

Getting declared "gifted" can give you massive amounts of privilege.

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