Internet Journal of Criminology
©
2011
ISSN 2045-6743 (Online)
Author: Kupchik, A.
New York: NYU Press, 2010
Reviewed by Richard Stansfield
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School crime and violence has been in decline for a number of years in the United States.
But the perception of imminent danger in the classroom is commonplace across America. With growing judicial support for schools to maintain safe and drug free environments, disciplinary matters have come to be handled more formally under a zero-tolerance policy. Violation of school rules under this condition have increasingly resulted in automatic expulsion or referral to law enforcement. Simultaneously, the number of schools using additional surveillance technologies and employing Security Resource Officers (SROs) has increased dramatically. The central concern of Homeroom Security is the message this sends to children, to accept authority without question or explanation.
The timely and thought-provoking response of Homeroom Security profiles four schools that, despite geographic and compositional differences, all embody this growing trend of
‘teaching to the rules’. While the goal of increased surveillance and punishment is to create a safer school environment, semi-structured interviews and observations of student/teacher interactions, expulsions, and arrests in response to perceived misbehavior, demonstrate how these policies have gone awry. Additionally, survey data were collected at each school to garner perceptions of rules and punishments, as well as students’ own experiences of being punished at school. These data were supplemented with figures from the National Center for Education
Statistics to show the prominence of school security measures.
The presence of SROs represents an intriguing debate in the book. The author highlights a number of cases where minor infringements of school policy became escalated due to the presence of SROs, whose training as law-enforcement officers and lack of counseling experience, led to the pursuit of unnecessarily excessive criminal punishment. Meanwhile, the book remarks that there has been a big decline in school crime and that it is unlikely that the
SROs had any effect on that. Firstly, this is an assumption made without empirical support and without an attempt to establish a causal link between SROs and the declining school crime rates.
Secondly, their presence is largely supported by students themselves. Over half of the students liked having a police officer at their school to deter crime and act immediately in the event of an incident. While Kupchik even-handedly represents all parties in the discipline process throughout, he quickly determines this opinion naïve. And while the book argues that such highly visible security measures may come at the expense of the learning environment, Jonathon
Kozol’s (1991) seminal work in Savage Inequalities makes a compelling foil: Children have to feel safe as a fundamental condition, without which, learning and education may not be possible.
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Internet Journal of Criminology
©
2011
ISSN 2045-6743 (Online)
Kupchik shares the concern of most in the school discipline literature, that the underlying problems behind student’s behavior go unnoticed when the focus is on punishment. But he does not simply re-examine school-based prevention programs that have helped create safer school environments (e.g. Lawrence, 2006; Cornell, 2006). Moving beyond this focus on prevention,
Kupchik provides more practical and pertinent recommendations for how schools can reshape their discipline policies and practices to be fairer and more effective. As an example, the book astutely observed few serious problems at any of the four schools, yet suspensions were 16 times higher in the predominantly black school. The unequal punishments demonstrate the need for consistency in policy, and sensitivity to the unequal social backgrounds and behaviors of children (Lareau, 2003). In the absence of empirical evidence of the effectiveness of zerotolerance in schools (Skiba, 2000), Homeroom Security serves a vital role in the debate between the rights of students and the responsibility of schools to maintain safe and drug-free climates.
References
Cornell, D.G. (2006) School Violence: Fears versus Facts. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Kozol, J. (1991) Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools . New York: Harper
Perennial.
Kupchik, A. (2010). Homeroom security: School discipline in an age of fear . New York: NYU
Press.
Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life . Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Lawrence, R. (2006). School Crime and Juvenile Justice , 2 nd
edition. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Skiba, R.J. (2000). Zero Tolerance Zero Evidence: An Analysis of School Disciplinary Practice .
Indiana Education Policy Center, Policy Research Report SRS2.
www.internetjournalofcriminology.com
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