Zero Tolerance Policies – The Real Reason

There’s a recent story bouncing around about how a Boston area teen girl got a call from a friend at a party who was too drunk to drive. She drove to the party, but just after she arrived the police showed up and rounded the kids up, netting her in the process. She wasn’t drinking, the police vouched for her story, and yet her high school punished her under its “zero tolerance” policy.

The facts of the story are not in dispute, and the school is deservedly on the receiving end of backlash and outrage, and a lawsuit to boot, over their action. The school is digging in.

This isn’t an isolated incident. Scan the news and you’ll find plenty of miscarriages of justice in the name of “zero tolerance.” Why, we might ask? Why does blind idiocy trump common sense?

David Mamet referred to socialism as the “abdication of responsibility.” I’m sure if you accused the school administrators thus, they’d squawk indignantly and declare that their policy is all about responsibility and protecting the safety of their charges. I’m sure they’ll tell us that teen drinking is such a dangerous problem that the only way to combat it is with an absolutist approach, and that if they yield on even this most egregious insult to our intelligence and values, it’ll undermine their position and have deleterious effects on future enforcement.

In the movie Caddyshack, Judge Smails told young Danny Noonan that he:

had sent boys younger than him to the gas chamber. Didn’t want to do it, felt I owed it to them.

The school’s decision can be interpreted as not “enabling” teens’ drinking by allowing them the safety net of calling a sober friend for a ride home. If you twist logic hard enough, that can be called a deterrent to drinking. Isn’t the message here that the school would rather let transgressors of its policy risk death than accept they’d might have a moment of clarity and seek help after breaking the rules?

How is that showing responsibility to their charges? How is that looking out for kids’ best interests?

Perhaps, then, the defense is that they’re trying to be responsible, but it’s so difficult that they must resort to extremes. Or, perhaps, the defense is that they’re trying to be responsible, but that they’re either misguided or trapped by “the system.”

Neither of these passes the sniff test. They’re both excuses for failure. And this brings us to the real and sinister reason for “zero tolerance.” It’s the same reason municipalities and states pass things like “three strikes” laws for criminals. It is Mamet’s abdication of responsibility. If you write hard rules, you don’t have to make judgment calls or decisions that could be questioned later. If you set up “zero tolerance” policies, you free yourself of having to assess situations on their merits and expose yourself to second guessing and the fallout from unpopular or (heaven forbid) questionable or wrong decisions. More broadly, if you are the guy in charge, ironclad rules both absolve you of blowback from unjust outcomes and insulate you from reliance on the judgment of subordinates.

Three decades of experience in both a corporate workplace and running a small business made it clear that the difficult jobs are those that require making decisions. It’s why the suits get paid the big bucks. Making decisions is hard, and exposes one to the chance failure. Fear of failure is a very powerful motivator, and many people will choose not to take career paths that overly expose themselves to failure.

In the free world i.e. the private sector, those who opt out of decision making are either destined to remain at a low level in the employment ranks, or lose out to competitors who are willing to risk making decisions.

In the public sector, where there is no competition, where there is no outside pressure to perform, people averse to making decisions manage to rise up to levels where they have the power to insulate themselves from having to make them. Thus, “zero tolerance.” Thus, “three strikes and you get 10 years minimum.” Thus, “sorry, the rules are the rules.” Thus, “sorry, it’s beyond my control.”

The real reason we have zero tolerance policies? Cowardice

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A RESPONSE FROM A READER

I think he’s mostly right until he includes three strikes laws at the end. The most famous (and I think first, but I could be wrong) three strikes law was passed in California. By ballot initiative. It was not a case of those in power wanting to avoid responsibility. It was a case of the voters being fed up and wanting to set hard rules that were intentionally beyond the control of those in power.

I don’t think strict rules designed to create clear standards and eliminate unfair discrepancies (like sentencing guidelines) should be confused with cowardly zero tolerance policies either. Sometimes we want things to be out of the control and not up to individuals who are prone to bias or who lack rigorous oversight.

I think whether you go to jail for 5 years or pay a small fine should not depend on which judge you got or which side of the bed he got up on or whether you’re pretty or fat or a smooth talker or the right race. And I think people who keep committing crimes again and again and again should be punished more harshly the third or fourth time they get caught. Let’s not confuse all that with cowardly officials who don’t want to do their jobs.

You don’t need to put me in touch with the author, but I would ask you to forward my comments to him/her. I think some excellent points have been ruined by lumping in examples that don’t fit.

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MY FOLLOW-UP

A quick response. While I appreciate the comment and agree that there is a distinction between three strikes and zero tolerance, they are both “carpetbomb” approaches to problems that should be addressed with precise action tailored to the circumstances. There are many, many stories of people who have committed petty non-violent crimes and ended up with decade long sentences because “the rules” allow no consideration of the nature of their third offenses. There are a dozen other points I want to make in this regard, and when time permits I will append them to the original piece with a nod to your responses, but for now, consider what you yourself indicate the three-strikes rules are: a response to a perceived problem. Within that context, they are exactly like zero-tolerance policies – they replace individual judgment and personal responsibility with rigid and impersonal rules. And, both as such and in the broader sense of “solution to problem,” they’re a bad idea with adverse unintended consequences and abdication of personal responsibility. The voters don’t sit on the bench and consider the accused and what he or she has done, they stay far away, removed from the situation and absolved of having to bear the responsibility for locking some kid up for a decade or more because he got busted with a dime bag. It’s akin to an internet bully launching horrible personal attacks at another from behind the wall of anonymity – there’s no feedback felt, no chance to recognize that maybe the accused doesn’t deserve a sentence that wrecks his life, no chance to say “ok, he screwed up, drop a commensurate penalty on him and maybe he can straighten out.”

There’s an old adage that says ‘better 100 guilty go free than one innocent go to jail.’ Yes, we’re not talking about innocents here, but the punishment should fit the crime, and to me it is not only a travesty but a fundamental abandonment of our basic moral principles to unjustly punish some because the system is inadequately punishing others. Sure, there’s a problem, but three-strikes is not the solution.