More and more US schools have police patrolling the corridors. Pupils
are being arrested for throwing paper planes and failing to pick up
crumbs from the canteen floor. Why is the state criminalising normal
childhood behaviour?
A policeman on the beat in a school in southern Texas. Photograph: Bob Daemmrich/Alamy
The charge on the police docket was "disrupting class". But that's
not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two
bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were
bullying her with taunts of "you smell".
"I'm weird. Other kids
don't like me," said Sarah, who has been diagnosed with
attention-deficit and bipolar disorders and who is conscious of being
overweight. "They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking
on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then they said: 'Put that away,
that's the most terrible smell I've ever smelled.' Then the teacher
called the police."
The policeman didn't have far to come. He patrols the corridors of Sarah's school, Fulmore Middle in Austin, Texas.
Like hundreds of schools in the state, and across large parts of the
rest of the US, Fulmore Middle has its own police force with officers in
uniform who carry guns to keep order in the canteens, playgrounds and
lessons. Sarah was taken from class, charged with a criminal
misdemeanour and ordered to appear in court.
Each day, hundreds of
schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such
as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up
in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing
cigarettes, wearing "inappropriate" clothes and being late for school.
In
2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets
to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school,
which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was
once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can
now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place
in college or a job years later.
"We've taken childhood behaviour
and made it criminal," said Kady Simpkins, a lawyer who represented
Sarah Bustamantes. "They're kids. Disruption of class? Every time I look
at this law I think: good lord, I never would have made it in school in
the US. I grew up in Australia and it's just rowdy there. I don't know
how these kids do it, how they go to school every day without breaking
these laws."
The British government is studying the American
experience in dealing with gangs, unruly young people and juvenile
justice in the wake of the riots in England. The UK's justice minister,
Crispin Blunt, visited Texas last September to study juvenile courts and
prisons, youth gangs and police outreach in schools, among other
things. But his trip came at a time when Texas is reassessing its own
reaction to fears of feral youth that critics say has created a
"school-to-prison pipeline". The Texas supreme court chief justice,
Wallace Jefferson, has warned that "charging kids with criminal offences
for low-level behavioural issues" is helping to drive many of them to a
life in jail.
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