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The Limits of the Criminal Sanction: School Districts and Education, Parents, Children and Teachers

By Andis Kaulins

One of the principal problems with the American legal system is the antiquated idea that criminal sanctions are the answer for everything, a position cogently criticized by the late Herbert L. Packer in The Limits of the Criminal Sanction, an essential book which should be required reading for every judge and legislator everywhere.

You CAN NOT solve society's problems by putting great numbers of people into jails and prisons for minor legal infractions and designating them as felons.

Rather, to correct a system gone astray, you have to work to solve the UNDERLYING problems, rather than their surface effects.

Here is another case in point:

Ohio Mom Jailed for Sending Her Kids to a Better School - TIME NewsFeed.

School districting is a hot potato politically and in urban areas it invariably falls along economic boundaries. Low income families living in low income neighborhoods have no choice but to send their children to the applicable "low income" schools where their lives may be put more or less in harms way due to violence, drugs and bad influences.

School life on the other side of the tracks may in fact be much better for ANY child, regardless of income.

So what is the solution?

Putting parents into jail who are trying to improve their children's lot is simply not the American way and misses the whole point of the American Dream. You DO NOT put people in jail for doing things that are essentially sensible. You DO NOT put people into jail for trying to improve the lot of their children.

If anything, YOU try to REWARD such behavior.

If such behavior runs foul of the laws, you CHANGE the laws.

No child should ever be forced to go to school in an environment which the children, parents -- and observers -- objectively would find to be harmful and for which school or other alternatives exist.

If this means that traditional ideas about school districting and financing have to be amended, then so be it.

It is not the Ohio mom who is error, it is the people who have permitted the current inequitable system of public education to develop who are at fault.

We think children and their parents should have the right to the following standard: normal schools for normal children, specially monitored schools for provenly violent, drug-afflicted and/or dangerous children. Do not forcibly send normal kids into school environments that are proven to be bad for them.

All normal children and their parents should have the right to select any public school they wish.

That would improve American education FAST, because the educational system would have to be revamped from the ground up. It would force school systems to figure out why some schools are favored and others not, and to improve the deficiencies of those schools not freely chosen.

Full post as published by LawPundit on January 27, 2011 (boomark / email).