Part 1

Part one.
HARD LESSONS is a collection of essays about crime control by Richard Hil and Gordon Tait.
While the lessons most directly apply to New Zealand, Australia, and the UK, the cycle of dysfunction described parallels that seen in the U.S. The book is divided into case studies which illustrate the failure of governments to devise policies that are effective in controlling crime. The authors argue that being tough on crime is a sure vote getter for politicians, but that in general it seems that policy makers do not foresee or plan for negative side effects of their policies.
Chapter One, written by editor Gordon Tait, argues that government “hurtles from crisis to crisis, from failure to failure, and it is the regulation of that failure which produces new initiatives and new forms of governance” (p.9).
This accurately describes government handling of school violence in the U.S.. Faced with the trend of violence in school, a logical response would be to find out how it happened that school became such a place as to compel students to risk arrest, injury or death, and then remove the reasons for violence.
Instead, U.S. legislators, (like those in N.Z., Australia and the U.K.), chose the simpler alternative of harsher penalties for violence.
In doing so, they copied previous failures of the same type: zero tolerance policing is based on ideas published in a seminal article entitled “Broken Windows” in the Atlantic Monthly magazine (George Kelling and James Q. Wilson 1982). Implications of the broken windows theory included that strict enforcement of petty crime would prevent the development of an atmosphere conducive to more serious criminal offending.
Kelling & Wilson’s model didn’t concern itself overmuch with why these crimes occured - it focused on suppression.
This approach had been discredited long before: “... consistent findings of operant psychology that the application of punishment is unpredictable, and unlikely to lead to the learning of new behavior.”

Skinner, B. F. 1953. Science and human behavior.
Skinner’s research in turn recapitulated still earlier experience during the Prohibition Era, when it became abundantly clear that raising penalties for manufacture, sales and use of alcohol had no effect on any of those enterprises.
In the next essay of Hard Lessons, author Murray Lee asserts that officials cultivate public fear of crime in order to demand more power with which to suppress that crime.
This, too finds it’s parallel in U.S. policy: the failing “War On Drugs”, which is modeled on the failed Prohibition, which is modeled on a previous failure of drug-control which began back when Sears, Roebuck & Company still sold cocaine syrup in quart bottles advertised in their catalogue. In all these cases, politicians played on public fears in order to assume expanded powers-of-office claimed necessary to ‘eradicate the problem once and for all.’
Zero‑tolerance first received national attention as the title of a program developed in 1986 by US Attorney Peter Noone in San Diego, California impounding seagoing vessels carrying any amount of drugs. The impracticality of this should be obvious: merchants could - and did - eliminate rivals by planting drugs for law-enforcement officials to ‘find’, bribing same to turn a blind eye to their own traffic, or both.
Innocents could easily be penalized with the guilty, as well: By 1990 the customs service boat impoundment program was quietly phased out after a Woods Hole oceanographic Institute research vessel was siezed for a marijuana cigarette foundin a seaman's cabin.
That is, by 1990 the folk who originated Zero Tolerance already knew it didn’t work, and abandoned it; meanwhile, the simplistic allure of the slogan was beginning to catch on with the general public.
If the politicians who cheered Zero Tolerance in 1986 didn’t know it was a failure by 1990, they should have. This begs the (rhetorical) questions: If our political leaders did not know ZT was useless - why not? ... and if they did know ZT was useless - why would they continue to push it?
Author Murray Lee’s essay continues on the subject of politician’s cultivation of public fear: ‘this often increases the fear of crime rather than providing a mechanism to ease societal anxiety.’ This too has it’s parallel in the history of Zero Tolerance.
In a sense, politicians are part of the Entertainment Industry; they sell their bit of drama to the public at a price like other actors. They have a natural conjunction of interest with news-media: profit.
Mass-media sell air-time to advertisers for money; politicians sell rhetoric to voters for power rather than cash, but the mechanism by which both operate is the same: getting and holding public attention.
Fear draws more attention than fun-stuff; logic tells us that we can indulge our interests, or let them slide; survival-instinct tells us that we must pay attention to that which can do harm.
The history of Zero Tolerance offers many examples, of which the following is representative: Court TV Radio - 04 Oct., 2006 University of Virginia psychologist Dewey Cornell looks at school shootings:
Julie: “Professor Cornell, ... It seems to me that the media would report
that school homicides and violence in general has been declining for ten years ....”
Dewey Cornell: “Violence and fear is more interesting than facts.”
Court TV Host: “... I think our societal perceptions are that school violence is NOT rare ‑ are we wrong on that?”
Cornell: “ ... We DO have a lot of bullying at school....” We do need to talk with students about violence, but not necessarily the extreme kinds we hear about in the news....Students will encounter fights, bullying, teasing, drugs, etc. in school. We need to focus our time and energy and school security dollars on the problems that we face every day....”
NicNYC: “What school‑based prevention methods are effective?”
Cornell: “... The most effective programs include counseling, cognitive behavior therapy,
conflict resolution, training, social skills training. ... One student alone cannot do much, but the whole school should address the problem. Teachers and parents and students need to be educated about bullying.”
Note: In this 2006 interview, Cornell echoes Skiba & Peterson six years previous in Zero Tolerance, Zero Evidence (2000): ... “Professional opinion has begun to coalesce around ...:creating a more positive school climate, attending to early warning signs, and effectively responding to disruption and violence with a broad array of strategies.”
(APA, 1993; Walker et al., 1996) Dwyer et al., 1998; Skiba & Peterson, 2000; Note also significant differences between Zero Tolerance strategy and Early Response strategy: Zero Tolerance deals with a complex social problem using the blunt tactic of a blacksmith: hammer it flat.
It requires no thought, no personal involvement - perfect for an assembly-line worker in a factory. Early Response demands personal investment of time and effort to deal with problems before they become dangerous. Zero Tolerance requires that citizens give up certain civil rights so that politicians can solve problems without bothering citizens. Early Response entails that social problems can be solved without sacrificing individual rights.
Returning to Hard Lessons, Chris Cunneen’s piece, “The Political Resonance of Crime Control Strategies: ZeroTolerance Policing,” traces the history of zero tolerance policing in New York City and New South Wales (Australia).
The findings here follow a familiar pattern; zero tolerance policing has done little to reduce crime in the long run, has contributed to social conflict and excited concerns of racism, and it is heavy handed and confrontational by definition.
Policies regulating western democracies create a tragic patchwork of reform after reform, with little improvement.
That is, Zero Tolerance is not the problem; Zero Tolerance is one example of a much greater problem visible in all these nations: based on the hard lessons of history, politicians have neither the interest nor the competence to set the standards by which other human beings run theirlives.
Their function - on paper - is to express the will of those who elected them - no more, no less.
When they depart from that, they are automatically dangerous to the very principles they were elected to protect.
Humanity as a species has come a long way from beginning to present, but systems of government are essentially un-changed from those in use several hundred years B.C.E.
It seems reasonable that a species which is capable of creating ways to travel between planets is, by now, also capable of social engineering far more useful than what’s now in use.
The course of the Zero Tolerance issue provides examples of what’s gone wrong with the System, and suggests remedies.