WHY TOLERANCE FOR 'ZERO TOLERANCE' IS RUNNING OUT

Whether It's On Drugs, Bullying, Weapons Or Even Littering, The
Pendulum Is Swinging To A Less Rigid Response

Dale Sabean is an unlikely rebel. The superintendent of the Western
School Board in Prince Edward Island is flaunting a "zero-tolerance"
law by allowing students to smoke cigarettes on school property.

Despite the threat of charges, Mr. Sabean designated an outside
smoking zone at the high school in Elmsdale. Smoking is bad for kids,
but the rigid new law is worse, he said, because last fall, after the
province passed it, about 150 kids moved to a busy highway to smoke.
"If we were to enforce the legislation, we would be saying to these
youngsters, 'Go stand on the shoulder of the road,' " he said.

The tiny Maritimes school board has become part of a growing backlash
against the concept of "zero tolerance," joining the Canadian and
American Bar Associations, American and Canadian civil-liberties
unions, the American Psychological Association, numerous academics
and, lately, opposition politicians in Ottawa.

Anti-zero-tolerance websites are also springing up, among them
beyondzerotolerance.org, which calls itself a "reality-based" approach
to teens.

Why is the once-popular policy of zero tolerance to drugs, weapons and
other social ills falling out of favour? "People do a lot of stupid
things with zero-tolerance policies," said Cecil Reynolds, a professor
of psychology and neuroscience at Texas A&M University.

Dr. Reynolds chaired a task force for the American Psychological
Association whose report cited U.S. cases such as a 10-year-old girl
being kicked out of school for two months because her mother packed a
small knife with her lunch so she could cut up an apple and a sick
six-year-old who was suspended after coming to school with Tylenol.

People who initially approved of "zero tolerance" -- such as parents
fearful for their children's safety -- have found it simply too rigid,
Dr. Reynolds said.

"Even the Center for Safe Schools has said zero tolerance policies
don't create safer schools," he said. "In fact, schools with
zero-tolerance policies tend to be schools students find oppressive
and don't do as well academically."

Criminologist Neil Boyd said such policies start with good intentions
and quickly become abusive.

"A zero-tolerance point of view means seeing things in black and
white, when the world is shades of grey," said the professor of
criminology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. "Often
what this means is you get people who are zealots imposing their own
view of reality."

It has been more than three decades since the catchy, malleable phrase
arrived in North America's lexicon. Zero tolerance can be traced back
to U.S. president Richard Nixon's "war on drugs" in 1969. By the early
1990s, zero-tolerance policies had become entrenched in educational
institutions throughout the U.S. and, to a lesser degree, in Canada.

Schools and colleges removed disciplinary discretion from teachers and
principals who caught kids cheating, drinking, smoking or bullying.
They laid out minimum punishments that were often as harsh as
suspension or expulsion.

Today, on the Internet, countless online businesses advertise zero
tolerance of spam. In the labour sector, unions commonly declare zero
tolerance of workplace bullying. In Britain, local governments have
legislated zero tolerance of "litter louts" and shabby buildings.
Canada's national parks have zero tolerance of berry pickers, while in
sports, soccer's World Cup organizers swore to have zero tolerance of
technical failures.

The term even resonates in the fashion world: Because of public alarm
about eating disorders among models skinny enough to wear "size zero,"
a new lobby has humorously declared war on "size-zero tolerance."

When the jokes start, it's clear that a movement has lost its
gravitas. In fact, zero tolerance has become almost
meaningless.

When an RCMP internal analysis critical of Vancouver's supervised
drug-injection site became public late last year, the federal police
force's "zero tolerance" against illegal drugs was loudly criticized
by scientists, doctors, police and politicians.

Thomas Kerr, lead researcher of several studies on injection-drug use
and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of British
Columbia, called zero tolerance "a well-documented failure." He said
the RCMP's analysis was factually wrong: "If this is the source of
information that informs government decisions, that's embarrassing and
that's disturbing."

The law-and-order politics that gave birth to the phrase remain
popular within some sectors of the population. This year, the federal
Conservative regime is expected to try to introduce tougher mandatory
minimum sentences for gun-related crimes, and revamp
dangerous-offender laws to make it easier to jail indefinitely people
with three serious convictions (a variation on U.S. "three strikes,
you're out" crime policies).

But despite the focus on law-and-order policies among federal
candidates in 2006, crackdown efforts by the minority Conservatives so
far have been stymied by the opposition parties, whose critics have
called the proposed legislation "ideological."

The Canadian Bar Association has taken a strong stance against the
Conservative gestures toward zero tolerance.

Said Vancouver lawyer Greg DelBigio, chair of the group's criminal
justice section, "I think it's a phrase that should not be used. What
does it mean? Does it mean every person that commits a criminal
offence, no matter the circumstance and no matter how trivial, gets
prosecuted?"

This fall, the national lawyers association opposed the Conservative
effort to introduce zero-tolerance-style mandatory minimum sentences
for gun offences under Bill C-10, pointing out that Canada's
violent-crime rate is stable.

"If the intent is to encourage harsher sentences, judges already have
sentencing tools to achieve that goal, if the offence and the offender
warrant an unusually harsh response," said an association press
release. "Bill C-10 will remove trial judges' discretion to impose a
fair and appropriate sentence."

Among those on the front lines of society's varied "wars" on crime,
drugs, cheating, bullying, smoking or any number of criminal offences,
the zero-tolerance mentality seems increasingly vulnerable to
tolerance -- or at least common sense.

In Vancouver, even the police force has largely scrapped such policies
and supported the treatment of drug addiction as a health and social
problem.

Many school boards keep zero tolerance on the books. But according to
Irene Lanzinger, vice-president of the British Columbia Teachers'
Federation and a long-time teacher of high-school math and science:
"My experience as a teacher is that it is not adhered to."

Many teachers faced with unruly students like the notion. "I have
heard the arguments for zero tolerance and I have some sympathy for
it," Ms. Lanzinger said. But she said that it doesn't work. "The kids
who are engaged in activities that are unacceptable are often the most
vulnerable kids, who come from the most difficult backgrounds."

Mr. Sabean refuses even to accept the standard definition of the
no-nonsense phrase. "Zero tolerance in my mind means you respond . . .
but that doesn't obligate you to take a specific plan of action," he
said. "I think there is some discretion."

In fact, discretion is precisely what zero tolerance was designed to
stamp out.

In his 2001 book Culture of Control, New York criminologist David
Garland writes that social thinkers believed in the 1970s that North
American and British societies would become increasingly permissive.

Instead -- even as crime rates fell -- there was a backlash against
permissiveness. For three decades, voters in the U.S. and Britain
consistently elected governments supportive of punitive law-and-order
policies. Dr. Garland suggests that the change was sparked by unrest
over the quickening pace of economic and cultural change.

Dr. Reynolds added that crowding may be partly to blame, noting that
in the U.S. the population recently topped 300 million. "People feel a
need for putting more controls in place when there's population
growth," he said.

Other factors probably include the erosion of religious, community and
extended-family support networks, increasing job mobility, dual
working-parent families and migration by rural dwellers to cities.

Demands for zero tolerance may also be fuelled by the media, through
stories about horrific crimes or shocking problems in schools and
colleges, such as last fall's Dawson College shootings in Montreal.
But in fact most statistics suggest that the crime rate is falling,
and that the vast majority of people are peaceful.

"Why are we scared?" Mr. DelBigio asked. Instead of making simplistic
calls for more law and order, he said, public leaders and politicians
should "disabuse the public of inaccurate notions they might have with
respect to crime."

Dr. Boyd, the criminologist, believes that the pendulum is now
swinging toward tolerance. "People have begun in most areas to realize
how complex all solutions are."