offenders of drug-related crimes. That year, Congress passed the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act, a program within the Department of Education that has funneled roughly half a million dollars a year to states and localities to reduce drug use. Given the federal drumbeat and frightening statistics, it’s not surprising that the national preoccupation became violent crime, especially drug-related violent crime and the escalation of gun violence associated with drug trafficking. Here’s a measure of how dramatically crime came to dominate the public psyche: In 1982, 3 percent of adults surveyed in a national poll named crime and violence as the country’s main problems. By 1994, more than 50 percent did, and violence was named as the chief problem of public schools.27 As shown by the statistics on reported incidents of violence and crime discussed below, the public fears of school violence and youth were disproportionate to any actual rise in the problem.
The Reagan years laid the foundation for the Lockdown High model. But it was during the Clinton administration, ironically, that the bricks and mortar of the school-as-prison theory and practice were applied to the problems of discipline and safety. Ironic both because Clinton was considered a liberal and because the actual incidence of school violence, as well as youth crime in general, was beginning to crest in 1992—the year he took office. By then, though, the criminal justice system was on growth hormones, revved up by draconian laws from Congress and state legislatures that were filling the nation’s ever-growing prison system, mostly with offenders of drug-related crimes. Young offenders, especially, came into the crosshairs of legislators and prosecutors who were egged on by the widely quoted criminologists James Q. Wilson, John DiIulio, and James Alan Fox. Wilson used dubious population projections to forewarn of a “cloud that the winds will soon bring over us,” tens of thousands of juvenile thieves, muggers, and killers. DiIulio pumped up the hysteria with his own predictions of a new breed of young criminal, whom he dubbed the “superpredator.” And Fox jumped on the fearmongering bandwagon with warnings of a “blood bath” of juvenile crime.28 Their concern was focused on a particular portion of the juvenile population—black and Latino males in urban settings—and their language revealed their not-so-subtle biases. The political response to the hype was not to prevent the supposed future crime wave. It was to crack down on youth. Between 1992 and 1995, forty-one states passed laws making it easier to prosecute juveniles in adult criminal court. (Today, all fifty states have such laws.) In more than half of the states, children younger than fourteen can be tried as adults for some crimes, and thirteen states have no minimum age for transferring a youth to adult court.
School violence, especially in urban areas, assumed a prominent place in the national fixation on juvenile crime. A 1993 New York Times article about New York City noted the “spread of guns and youth violence into schools.” The article mentioned a parent boycott to protest hallway violence in Eastern District High School—the same Brooklyn school that twenty-four years earlier was the site of protests by black and Puerto Rican students against perceived racism.29 Over just one generation, the nature of school violence had morphed to reflect a different society outside the schoolhouse doors. The social protest and racial and ethnic rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s had faded. The crack-fueled drug wars of many urban areas sent violence and guns coursing through neighborhoods. Schools in those neighborhoods were not insulated from the dangers, and any news reports of crime in schools contributed to the public’s perception that young people and schools were dangerous—especially in cities. But there were no statistics at the time to prove it.
This time, the official response at every level—from school boards to state legislatures on up to the White House and Congress—matched the widespread fear of youth violence. In 1994, President Clinton took Reagan’s Drug Free Schools Act and went it one better, creating the Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities Act, adding violence-prevention funding to the agenda of the legislation. The same year, he signed the Gun Free Schools Act, which required states to enact their own zero tolerance laws for weapons possession by students, which would be punishable by mandatory expulsion. Clinton followed the law with a presidential directive that encouraged school districts to adopt policies requiring school uniforms for students as a way to reduce violence and promote discipline, and ordered the Department of Education (DOE) to distribute a uniforms manual. Clinton also initiated an annual report on school safety produced jointly by the DOE and the Department of Justice, called “Indicators of School Crime and Safety.” It was the first effort to collect data from schools nationally in order to track the actual incidence of crimes and violence. It has been published since 1998, with data on victimizations of students and teachers, discipline, and police actions, and its release usually prompts the news media to report key findings. Under Clinton, an entire multiagency, legislatively driven school violence and safety bureaucracy was elaborated with its requisite millions in annual public funding.
The White House set an agenda that reinforced and inflated the view that schools and students were out of control, as a political response to the public clamor about a perceived problem. At the local school district level, administrators and school boards responded to parent and teacher fears of violence and disruption, whether real or imagined. A 1995 survey by the American Federation of Teachers of school districts in two hundred of the largest U.S. cities indicated not only an entrenched and widespread fear of student violence, but also an embrace of a penal-system approach to the problem: 95 percent of respondents employed security personnel; 59 percent had metal detectors; and 53 percent had installed security cameras.
JOHNNY GOT A GUN
This fear and loathing of student violence and disorderly schools could have come to a low simmer, ultimately evaporating, just as school crime and violence itself had been diminishing. After all, the downward trend was unmistakable for anyone who payed attention to those annual reports on school crime and safety. Mirroring the same decline in crime experienced in the general population, youth crime overall began to plummet after its apex in 1993. For youth homicides, the numbers are dramatic: from 1993 to 1998, juvenile homicide arrests dropped by 56 percent, reaching their lowest rate since the FBI began recording this statistic in 1964.30 School crime echoed this trend: Between 1992 and 1998, the rate of nonfatal violent crimes for students ages twelve to eighteen dropped from 48 per 1,000 students, to 43 per 1,000.31 From 1995 to 1999, the percentage of students in that age group who reported being victims of theft or violent crime decreased from 10 percent to 8 percent, a trend most prominent among middle-school students, who are often characterized as the most difficult. Over that same time span, students were feeling safer, with 5 percent in 1999 saying they avoided one or more places in their school, compared to 9 percent in 1995.32 Even these small numbers suggest that the public’s view of schools as dangerous was out of proportion to the reality for 90 percent of students during those years with higher rates of reported incidents.
As for violent deaths at schools—the boogeyman of the school-violence nightmare—there simply is no real trend at all. In the 1992–1993 school year (the first year such data were collected) there were fifty-seven “school-associated deaths,” and that included thirty-four students killed by other students and six student suicides; the rest were teachers and other school employees. The total dipped over the next few years, and then reached fifty-seven again in 1997–1998. The 1998–1999 school year, the year of Columbine, would have had the lowest number of school deaths on record—twenty-five—but for the fifteen deaths in that tragic incident. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the DOE agency that copublishes the annual school crime and safety report, “Between July 1, 1992, and June 30, 1999, no consistent pattern of increase or decrease was observed in the number of homicides at school.” Indeed, each year’s report typically begins with a summary noting that students are safer at school than away from school. The 2000 report noted that students were less than half as likely to be victims of a violent crime at school than elsewhere. And the trend continued: in the 2003–2004 school year, young people were more than 50 times more likely to be murdered, and almost 150 times more likely to commit suicide, away from school. Schools, it seems, are a much safer haven than children’s homes and communities, and much safer than prevailing perceptions suggest.33
So why didn’t school violence
