Moving this to the BBQ Pit.
Hazing is prohibited in the United States Armed Forces, Govindha. Last I heard, they’re pretty good warriors.
I’m pretty sure that this isn’t happening there, but I know that when a student is accused of a violent crime in my school district, they’re not allowed back in school until the courts have deemed them not guilty. Safety of the other enrolled students and staff and all. Also, at least my student handbook said something about if you face criminal charges for something (violence, drug use, dui) the school can take action (expell, drop from teams, and on second/third offense[drugs or alcohol], expell).
Just my school district, but the violent crimes thing makes sense to me, in most cases.
Wow, my first pit post. Don’t flog me!
You’ve got an odd username for someone with this viewpoint.
Yes I’m sure it’s all well and good until your kid gets some shit dumped on their head.
Those girls who were Expelled, should get NOTHING. No Prom, No Graduation and diffenately No Diploma. They should have to come back next year and attend school with the girls they humilated, beat-up, next year as incoming Seniors. I don’t care if they have College lined-up. What they did was inexcusable, and should be punished, they should be glad they are not in jail.
Truly, you must be joking.
Geez, I dunno. Maybe having to suffer the consequences of your behavior would go a lot farther to making them productive citizens. If they are capable of learning from their mistakes, that is. Sorry, but for everyone of every class and station in life, an good “opportunity for growth” is always painful. Why should they be protected? Good forbid, they might learn something about right and wrong…
And who are we kidding, they’re still going to get into a college somewhere. So maybe they have to go to a Community College for the first two years, and not Harvard. Boo-hoo.
They commited ASSAULT. Frankly, I can’t imagine that if this had happened in a less tony school, there would have been all this hubbub about lawsuits and fucking prom and school board wishy-washy-ness. Jesus, I am sick to death of those members of the privileged class who think that society’s rules don’t apply to them just because their checking accounts are fucking bigger. Fucking whiny-ass babies. The kids make me sick, but the parents who cultivated this kind of environment make me sicker.
Doesn’t sound like much fun for the now-seniors. As a sequel to Fish Guts & Excrement, they get the chance to spend nine more months with the same girls!!!
I can’t think of anything appropriate to do to these little shits. Is there any kind of liability that can be applied to their parents? apart from the ones who provided the alcohol?
I taught at Glenbrook North for 6 years, and aside from the fact that none of the lawsuits surprised me at all (“Protect my Baby from Reality at all Costs” – the parental call to arms), the position of the school has amused me no end (“Why, this has never happened before!”). They suspended students 8 years ago for the same sorts of “fun” but without the videotape evidence to appall the general public. Why, one of my own little lovely students pissed on others back then. We were all so proud.
I’m just glad they have pressed charges against the keg-buying parents. I hope that’s a wake-up call to the I-just-want-to-be-my-child’s-friend crowd. You’re a parent. Be a damn parent.
God, I could go on and on about GBN’s dirty laundry. But I’m sure I’d get sued. :rolleyes:
welby, Lynne_kilii, Rilchiam, World Eater, and niblet_head:
I’m not sure that we’re all that much in disagreement. I think we can all agree that what the senior girls did is reprehensible. I think we can all agree that they deserve punishment, and serious punishment at that. But I don’t think they should get any additional punishment than someone who wasn’t a student who committed the same acts. I think they should be punished the same as any group of adults that beat and throw feces/garbage/etc at a bunch of teenage girls.
But apparently, the criminal penalties that such conduct entails are insufficient: the school board has voted to inflict academic penalties upon the senior girls as well. The initial decision, if I’m not mistaken, was to expel the girls and to prevent them from graduating high school. This is extra punishment that these girls alone would receive greater than any adult who commits the same offense.
I can understand the impulse that would lead the school board to inflict an academic punishment on these girls. The girls did a bad thing, and the school board has the power to punish them. So why not?
I can think of at least two reasons why not. First, as I explained above, it would create a worse punishment for students than for non-student adults who commit the same crime. welby, not agreeing with this line of argument, made an excellent point:
There’s a difference between punishments inflicted by the school board (e.g., expulsion) and punishments inflicted by my employer (e.g., firing me for committing a felony): the school board is a state actor. The school board and the criminal courts are two parts of the same entity: the government. I don’t think I’m being crazy when I suggest that the government, writ large, should treat its wrongdoing citizens in a rational matter. Thus, if the government thinks that people who beat up teenage girls and throw feces at them aren’t being punished enough, it should raise the penalty for such behavior for everyone, not just a small group of wrongdoers (i.e., public school students).
My second reason for why the school board shouldn’t inflict an additional punishment on the girls is that such a punishment would be counterproductive. One way in which the school board’s punishment is counterproductive is that it is, by definition, excessive. Why do I call it excessive? Because such conduct is already a criminal offense and punishable by the criminal law. The criminal law’s punishment of such behavior is (to the extent that we believe in the legislative process) the perfect amount: it balances retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation, while not being more onerous than necessary for the punished offender. If the school board adds any increment of punishment to that imposed by the criminal law, then the school board’s punishment is excessive. (And if we think that the amount of punishment imposed by the criminal law is too lenient, then we should increase the punishment imposed by the criminal law so that the increased punishment applies equally to all wrongdoers. We should not just tack on some extra punishment that will only apply to a certain class of wrongdoers.)
Another way in which the school board’s punishment is counterproductive in that it does much to ruin these girls’ lives; for example, it makes it very difficult for them to go to college. Some of you attacked this notion as being wrongheaded. For example, welby wrote:
. To this, niblet_head added:
.
I get three notions from these comments:
(1) the wrongdoers’ welfare is irrelevant;
(2) the wrongdoers’ welfare is actually increased by being punished, because they’ll learn how to comport themselves in society; and
(3) the wrongdoers’ welfare isn’t forever reduced (they can still go to college, it’ll just be harder).
I disagree with (1) for two reasons. First, I disagree with (1) because I think that punishment should be inflicted parsimoniously. That is, the government should use the least amount of punishment necessary to accomplish optimal retribution/deterrence/etc. The idea is basically utilitarian: I want to maximize societal welfare, and therefore the government should inflict no gratuitous punishments because that only produces suffering (of the wrongdoers) and no net benefit (since any marginal increase in deterrence is more than offset by the wrondoers’ suffering). Since the punishment imposed by the criminal law is already the optimal amount, the school board’s punishment is excessive and therefore non-parsimonious.
The second reason I disagree with (1) is that I am selfish. I’m want to maximize my own welfare. And since if the girls are prevented from having a meaningful future they’ll either commit further crimes or become wards of the state, or otherwise contribute less to societal welfare, I don’t like the school board’s punishment. I’d rather live in a world with a higher societal welfare than a lower societal welfare because some of that increase in societal welfare accrues to me (though an infinitesimal fraction, in the aggregate).
I disagree with (2) for pretty much the same reasons. The school board’s punishment is gratuitous. The function statement (2) attributes to the punishment – teaching the girls right from wrong – is already optimally performed by the punishment of the criminal law. The school board’s punishment is therefore gratuitous.
I mostly agree with (3) – that the punished girls’ welfare won’t be permanently reduced (e.g., they’ll still be able to go to college eventually, but it will just be harder for them and perhaps they won’t go to as good a school). I certainly agree that expulsion is not tantamount to putting the girls into a permanent vegetative state, which would be a huge societal strain. But I think we both agree that expulsion will have some effect on reducing the girls’ – and thus society’s – welfare above and beyond the punishment imposed by the criminal law. And as I have argued earlier, the criminal law, by supposition, produces the optimal reduction in the girls’ welfare. Any further reduction (i.e., further punishment) is suboptimal: it’s gratuitous punishment – suffering inflicted without a net societal gain in deterrence/etc.
Finally, let me address one point raised by Lynne_kilii:
I think that something like the principle you describe is the proper function of academic discipline. The school board should be ensuring a safe learning environment. It should inflict punishments only when necessary to do so. By contrast, it should not use its ability to impose punishments as a mandate to “help” the criminal courts punish wrongdoers. The criminal courts don’t need the school board’s help. Indeed, the school board’s attempts to “help” will just muck things up, producing a suboptimal allocation and magnitude of punishments.
Instead, the school board should only impose academic punishments (e.g., suspensions, expulsions) when needed to protect the school learning environment. So I can see why a school board would want to expel students who pose a threat to the school environment. But I was under the impression that this incident occurred just days before the end of the academic year. These girls, who have already been arrested and are ostensibly awaiting trial (or plea arrangement, more likely), probably aren’t a huge threat of disrupting two or three days of class. And if they are, suspend them those last few days – but don’t expel them. What’s the point? Whose protected by the expulsion?
I think the real reason that the school is letting them graduate is rather obvious. Given that the “parents” (I use that term in quotes because the adults in question are not displaying any parenting behaviors at all) have already lined up lawyers for their little sweeties, the school district would be quickly sued into bankruptcy if they actually denied anyone their diplomas.
It seems the school is using the “just get them out of here and out of our hair” defense.
I agree with you. In theory to their specific wrong-doing. But I get the idea that they’re standing trial for charges of a violent crime, or at least being an accessory there-of. Which means, that whether or not it’s actually “all that bad”, the school district must maintain strict guidelines according to violent criminal matters. If all the evidence points to not guilty in a [fill-in-your-favorite-violent-crime-here] trial, we still need to protect the students. Such is life, these girls will live. We wouldn’t want one of the people who actually did this coming back. Theoretically the argument could be made “these girls could have stopped it, why are they being let in pending trial, and Little Johnny the Alleged Junior Beater isn’t?”
Again, in theory, I agree, in practice, gotta do it by the book, at least in public schools that could lose their funding easily/get sued because of stupid shit like this.
Mr. Hand:
I must respectfully disagree with some of the reasoning in your post(s), most specifically:
While I can fully agree with your concern with the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment (eg. this is exactly why I find “hate-crime” legislation so despicable), nevertheless, in reality, even under a perfectly fair and impartial dispensation of justice, two people who commit and are punished for equivalent misdeeds will inevitably suffer dissimilar outcomes. This is because individuals co-exist simultaneously in several different domains.
For example, two people are (separately) arrested for dealing heroin. Person A is a socially-alienated, poor, shabby creature, caught in a vacant parking lot . Person B is a district court judge, caught in his posh $1M home. Let’s suppose the law is applied to them equally (I know, I know - this is America ;)). Both receive 10-year prison sentences. And that’s largely it for Person A’s punishment. But Person B also ends up paying a huge fine, has his house seized, loses his wife and custody of his children, loses his job, is disbarred, gets booted out of the Loyal Order of Water Buffalos, etc… You get the picture. Person B simply had more to lose than Person A.
And these vile urchins in Illinois simply had more to lose than a lot of their contemporaries.
And if they resort to criminality subsequently (because of “excessive” punishment) then that’s another issue. There can be no freedom or justice if the merited punishment of wrong-doers is not meted out for fear of their future retaliation against society.
Whew. Glad I got that out.
bovinespy said:
I’m in total agreement with you (though not necessarily on the hate crime business – haven’t made up my mind on that yet).
bovinespy then said:
Still with you. Nothing wrong about this.
But here’s where I disagree with you:
I think that your analogy between the disparate outcomes wrongdoers subject to identical punishments experience and the experience of these girls is not apt. These girls are actually experiences not just worse outcomes “because they have more to lose” – the girls are actually being additionally punished by another government entity: the school board. The girls are a case of extra punishment, not just more to lose.
Compare the girls to a set of adults who set upon a group of teenage girls and in the guise of initiating them, beat them up and throw feces/garbage/etc at them. The adults get punished by the criminal law. The girls get punished by the criminal law – and by the school board. This is not just a case of disparate outcomes from the same punishment due to wrongdoers being in dissimilar circumstances. One government entity – the criminal courts – inflicted a punishment. Then another government entity – the school board – came along and inflicted a separate punishment.
Let me point out that I don’t think that this is necessarily unconstitutional; I doubt that this is a double jeopardy problem or what have you. But I do think it’s a bad idea for the school board to take it upon itself to tack on extra punishments for its crime-committing students.
bovinespy’s last substantive point was as follows:
When I was talking about the girls’ future criminality, I guess I wasn’t being too clear as to what I meant. I was referring to the idea that the amount of punishment should be, in a sense, “cost”-justified. Punishment causes suffering, and so therefore should be meted out as little as necessary to accomplish the punishment’s purposes. Those purposes include, for example, deterrence – both specifically deterring these particular girls from doing bad things in the future, and generally deterring everyone from doing bad things in the future. The increase in deterrence is a “good” achieved by inflicting punishment (as deterrence increases overall social utility); the suffering punishment causes is its corresponding “bad” (as even one person’s suffering decreases overall social utility). Punishments should be imposed at a level where the marginal increase in deterrence equals the marginal increase in suffering.
Your final point that I quoted above was addressed to my argument about why the suffering punishment causes is “bad.” Punishing wrongdoers decreases social utility in two ways. First, it decreases the welfare of the punished person, whose welfare, as she is a part of society, gets counted in the aggregate welfare of society. Second, punishing a wrongdoer decreases social welfare because of the various externalities caused by one person’s suffering. If the girls are punished, their families are affected, as our their towns, and so on and so forth. All of society feels the negative repercussions, as we’ll all be a bit poorer from the loss of the girls’ contributions to the economy, or otherwise worse off because the girls have become criminals or whatever. These externalities also decrease social welfare. (There are additional ways in which punishments decrease social welfare – e.g., the costs of courts and prisons and the inefficiency of having people be lawyers and jail guards instead of doctors and engineers. These administrative costs would also be counted.)
But just because punishments decrease social welfare doesn’t mean we don’t punish. After all, punishing wrongdoers also increases social welfare – for example, by promoting the deterrent effect of the laws, or by incapacitating those with a propensity for wrongdoing and preventing them from victimizing others in society. We should punish wrongdoers to the extent that the costs of punishment are offset by its benefits.
So when you say “[t]here can be no freedom or justice if the merited punishment of wrong-doers is not meted out for fear of their future retaliation against society,” I agree that you are right. But I also think you’re begging the question – allow me to draw your attention to the word to which I added emphasis: merited. How much punishment is merited? That’s what we’re trying to figure out. It’s not something out there in the sky that we can ponder and figure out. The notion that the girls did something wrong doesn’t tell us how much to punish them. Should they get 20 years in the pen? Or 20 hours community service? I think we can both agree that these two figures are too extreme, but it’s really hard for us to agree on a figure in the middle that’s an appropriate punishment, based solely on our notion of “the girls did something bad.”
Instead, to calculate that proper punishment, we have to balance the costs of punishment against its benefits.
Some schools act in loco parentis. I don’t know if Glenbrook does or not, but there are plenty of schools that do.
And the adults would also most likely be fired from their jobs.
So what’s the difference?
I say, give it to them and give it to them hard. They deserve it, the little bastards.