ZERO TOLERANCE MAKES ZERO SENSE IN REAL WORLD

Any doubt I harbored that the world had lost its mind was erased with the
news account from Texas about a high school honor student expelled for one
year because a parking lot monitor spotted a bread knife in the bed of the
boy's parked truck.

Not a bayonet or one of those nasty hunting things worn in sheaths on the
belts of some of my strange friends who drive camouflaged pickup trucks.
Nope. A bread knife that had fallen out when the kid hauled some of his
grandmother's possessions.

"Zero tolerance" often sounds good because the words bring up imagines of
the riffraff being culled out before doing harm to the good kids. But when
I think of what happened to that honor student - or the 7-year-old bounced
in Cahokia for innocently bringing nail clippers to school or a myriad of
similar situations - what the words "zero tolerance" tend to bring up is my
lunch.

Two of my teen-agers park cars at their high school. They've never had any
problems. Great kids. Honor students themselves. But could a bread knife
fall out of something we hauled in one of our cars? Could it happen in the
car your child drives?

Luckily, I understand that our high school is not fooled into
zero-tolerance myopia.

My kids adamantly insist, when I ask them, that they do not use drugs. I
truly, truly believe them. But nobody, including them, can guarantee what a
friend might bring in one of their cars.

What do you suppose would happen if one of my kids was stopped by police
and a panicked buddy stashed something illegal beside the seat?

Big trouble, I'll guarantee. Could we lose the car in this zero-tolerance,
asset-forfeiting world? Maybe.

I do see the other side of it sometimes. For example, I deeply resent
spending my taxes on public housing that too often becomes a haven for drug
dealing. I said hooray when Congress made it easier for housing officials
to throw the dopeheads out, so the needy could live in safety and dignity.

But now the U.S. Supreme Court has endorsed the broadest possible
interpretation: that a housing authority is within its rights to remove
even an unknowing tenant if, for example, a relative brings in a guest with
drugs.

I sure hope that kind of power is used cautiously. But in these
zero-tolerance times, who knows?

Why don't we apply the same logic and kick the whole family out of public
housing if one of the members proves to be a thief? Or a rapist? Or a
killer? In those cases, we figure - rightly I think - that it's enough to
send the offending party to prison without making a whole family homeless.
So why don't we think that way in drug cases too?

Being arbitrary passes itself off as being tough. But it's not the same
thing at all. It is the opposite thing from being fair. If anything, being
arbitrary is just being lazy.

A system that shrugs off the difference between a knife brought to school
with intent to harm and a knife lying harmlessly in a parked truck is Lazy.
Capital L. (Thankfully, the Texas boy's not-so-lazy parents fought back and
he's in school again.)

I know my old friend William Beatty would have agreed with me. When he died
less than a year ago, I devoted this space to his memory, and how he hated
the arbitrary sentencing guidelines that had been forced on federal judges
like himself by the Department of Justice.

He impressed upon me more than once the idea that real justice came from a
thinking judge, empowered to consider all the factors and armed with the
widest possible options to make the penalty fit the crime. Hence his own
creative approaches, like sending public officials convicted of filching
weed-cutting money to go cut the weeds themselves.

In Beatty's world, a school principal would have ordered the boy with the
knife to wash cutlery in the cafeteria for a day. That would send a message
about carelessness. No damage would be done to the boy's education or his
outlook. And our world would be just as safe.