GROUND ZERO OF ZERO TOLERANCE

The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson is easy to hate.

Even when he's performing diplomatic miracles, like obtaining American POWs
from enemy territory, the plaudits are half-hearted and tentative. News
accounts invariably include snide references to his camera-hogging tendencies.

So when he steps onto the contentious terrain of race and public education,
he becomes the target of furious anger. Listen to any talk show discussing
the Decatur School Board's expulsion of seven black students for a football
game brawl and you're sure to get an earful of anti-Jackson rhetoric.

Were I to use this column to chide Jackson for sticking his nose into the
Decatur situation, my resulting mail would overflow with kudos for my
courage to speak "truths."

Admittedly, occasional kudos would be a welcome interruption to the stream
of hate mail I receive whenever my column deals with issues of race. But
I'm afraid Ill have to endure another round of hate mail because all I have
to say about Jackson's Decatur campaign is: Go, Jesse, go.

In one fell swoop the leader of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition has brought a
much needed focus on the authoritarian impulses driving "zero-tolerance"
policies, and the disparate effects those policies have on America's
minorities.

In the last two decades, many of society's public institutions have adopted
a zero-tolerance philosophy, partly in response to fears of crime and
social disarray. From the mandatory minimum sentencing approach in the
criminal justice system, to the New York police department's "broken
windows" (where no offense is too petty to be prosecuted) approach to
crime, policies that proudly exclude mercy are all the rage these days.

One result of mandatory minimums, however, is a prison population that is
rapidly approaching 2 million people. The U.S. now imprisons
proportionately more of its citizens than any nation on Earth, according to
the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that researches
criminal justice issues.

This incarceration epidemic is being fueled by an idiotic war on drugs that
drastically misallocates social costs and benefits.

For example, even as we are learning more about tobacco companies'
deception about their lethal products, we are discovering the medical
benefits of marijuana. Yet mandatory minimum sentences have landed record
numbers of Americans in jail for marijuana offenses, while tobacco farmers
are rewarded with taxpayer subsidies and cigarette-smoking rates among
youth rise.

Can anyone see the madness here?

These absolutist policies lack the important features of judicial
discretion and mitigation.

The underlying issue is the age-old tension between security and liberty.
Every society must determine to what extent individual liberty can be
sacrificed to ensure collective safety.

That balance requires a delicate calibration. In general, authoritarian
societies that require conformity adopt the zero-tolerance model, while
constitutional democracies tend to lean toward the protection of individual
liberties.

In Taliban-run Afghanistan, for example, there is zero tolerance for robbery.

Whether one is stealing bread to feed a family or to feed the birds, the
punishment is dismemberment. Such absolutist policies also were a feature
of the authoritarian societies in the former Soviet bloc. There were no
mitigating circumstances, no exceptions.

On the other hand, the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution includes
explicit safeguards against such excesses (prohibiting cruel and unusual
punishment and demanding due process, for example). The heart of liberty is
tolerance, not zero tolerance.

The growing appeal of authoritarian policies is the larger issue
illuminated by the Decatur explosion. And while these policies are
spreading throughout society, the realms of criminal justice and education
are where they are doing the most harm.

Supporters of zero tolerance and mandatory minimums tout the impartiality
of that uniform approach but fall silent in the face of evidence that those
policies have a racially disparate effect.

According to a 1996 study by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice
Statistics, for instance, 12 percent of America's drug users are black and
70 percent are white. Yet black Americans are eight times more likely than
whites to be incarcerated on drug charges. In Decatur, five of the six
students expelled from school last year were black.

Jackson is right to draw parallels between the urge to expel black students
from school and the urge to jail them. Where are these students likely
headed with unproductive time on their hands and no education in their futures?

Many citizens of Decatur describe the school board members as good people
with honorable intentions and that is no doubt correct. But the
authoritarian presumptions of zero tolerance make even the best of us walk
with a little goose in our step.