Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse

by Annette Fuentes

In the dozen years since the shootings at Columbine High School, hysteria has distorted the media’s coverage of school violence and American schools’ responses to it. School violence has actually been falling steadily throughout the last decade, and yet schools across the country have never been more preoccupied with security.

This climate of fear has created ripe conditions for the imposition of unprecedented restrictions on young people’s rights, dignity, and educational freedoms. In what many call the school-to-prison pipeline, the policing and practices of the juvenile justice system increasingly infiltrate the schoolhouse. These “Zero tolerance” measures push the most vulnerable and academically needy students out of the classroom and into harm’s way.

Investigative reporter Annette Fuentes visits schools across America and finds metal detectors and drug tests for aspirin, police profiling of students with no records, arbitrary expulsions, teachers carrying guns, increased policing, and all-seeing electronic surveillance. She also reveals the many industries and “experts” who have vested interests in perpetuating the Lockdown High model. Her moving stories will astonish and anger readers, as she makes the case that the public schools of the twenty-first century reflect a society with an unhealthy fixation on crime, security and violence.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, The United States Of America

240 pages, Hardcover

First published March 14, 2011

Reviews

[Jane · Rating 1 out of 5]

After working in a high school office for 2 years and teaching for 5 years, I completely disagree with most of what the author had to say. She thinks that $432 per year spent on V-Soft, a security system that checks for pedophiles who want to enter school propety, is a waste of money. After using that system every day at work, I think that is a small price to pay for student safety.

She also does not like the idea of having so much money spent on police security. But after seeing the things I saw, a police presence is invaluable, even in a small town that seems safe. Having police on campus allows the principals and counselors to do their work encouraging students without seeming overly disciplinary, which causes students to mistrust them. I also cannot imagine any of the high school principals I know scaling a 6 foot privacy fence single-handedly to perform a drug bust.

It was interesting enough reading, but as an outside investigative reporter, she really has no concept of what is actually going on in schools. I believe that the breakdown of the family and society are the cause for problems that kids have today, not the "Lockdown" method created by school administrators and board members. They are just doing their job to keep students safe.

[Gee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not American, but I am interested in education and the issues raised in this book such as students' rights and violence in schools. This is a brief but compelling look at the issues of increasing criminalisation of school children in the United States, with chapters on the effects of school security systems, zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, and school resource officers. Fuentes argues that the hysteria surrounding school shootings, drugs, and gang behaviour has led to extreme measures which ultimately just aren't effective. The book doesn't offer many solutions, and parts of it could do with closer editing to remove repetition and the such like - but it's a fascinating read on an important subject that doesn't seem to be covered very often, at least not in full-length book form. Fuentes's arguments are sound, and her anecdotes are startling and shocking - the Goose Creek police raid on Stratford High School, and the girl who had to finish her education in an alternative school after a dress code infringement particularly stand out.

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be required reading for anyone who works in schools and anyone who has children in school.

I personally believe that our civil liberties are being threatened by conservative government at every turn, and the current administration is not doing enough to undo what Clinton and Bush started.

So, when you read this book and you see how treating kids like criminals actually INCREASES problems in schools, you start to see how bad our education system has gotten. If we stopped paying security guards and started paying more teachers and more counselors, we'd be a lot better off.

Zero tolerance policies only harm the innocent and push kids on the edge over into the world of criminal activity. This goes for drugs and violence alike. Parents need to know their rights and their child's rights and fight for those rights. One parent can make a difference, and the kids who fought back seem more well-rounded than the kids who just sat back and accepted that they were now one of the "bad" kids.

I also loved how Fuentes pointed out the economic connections between the advocates of greater school security and the companies that provide the security. That alone should make parents suspicious.

The funny thing is, I was reading this book in conjunction with another book about how to keep your child drug-free, and while the books disagreed about the statistics of teen drug use (and abuse), they both agreed that zero-tolerance the way it is used in schools today does NOT do any good for a teen addict. It makes kids afraid to talk about the problem, which causes more problems.

I remember at my high school we were so excited when part of the school was burned down (probably by a student, but that person was never caught), and we had to walk outside in the middle of winter to get to class. We were HAPPY because we got to see the sun. Otherwise, you never left the building. Things got worse when my sister started high school--rather than addressing a drug problem with counseling and prevention classes, they started limits on how many times you could use a bathroom in a semester. You weren't allowed to use the bathrooms between classes at all, apparently. When my mother protested because (HELLO!) my sister has Crohn's disease, the school treated her like crap and made her get a signed copy of a document from the doctor certifying the disease. A fax or email would not do. How ridiculous is this just to make sure your kid can use the bathroom???

As my son goes through the school system, I'm going to be watching carefully for things that are not acceptable. And I'm going to find other parents who think rationally, and we're going to find alternate solutions. And, who knows, I may even need to run for the School Board to talk some sense into these people. They're kids--they'll make mistakes. We need to make sure they're not punished for their mistakes for their entire lives.

[Alex Nuttle · Rating 4 out of 5]

good book if you are unfamiliar with the school to prison pipeline and the trend of public schools becoming more and more like prisons in function.

[Benjamin Britton · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Back when I was in high school, you could be expelled if you had drugs. But today, kids are suspended for talking back to teachers, even for being tardy or skipping classes,” says Christine Agaiby, a restorative justice specialist at Alternatives, a Chicago youth agency who was involved in writing the new code. “Chicago Public Schools was being held accountable by police who were sick of making arrests in schools. The arrest rates were incredible.” Alternatives had been doing restorative justice work, which had been written in the juvenile justice code in 1999, organizing peer juries as an alternative to juvenile detention. In 2000, the Chicago Public Schools central office took notice of what was happening, and other people were telling CPS of the benefits of restorative justice.”


"The campaign is trying to support local efforts to reform but also to change the national dialogue. “We want to encourage school districts to take on new approaches to discipline,” Sullivan says. “Use discipline as a constructive part of learning, make it part of kids’ social-emotional development—that is how we should be talking about safety and discipline.”

[Colin Cox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lockdown High explores and interrogates the way in which public schools across the United States in the early aughts adopted aggressive, law enforcement measures as a means of protecting public educational spaces. According to Fuentes, these methods are not only ineffective but create a resentful, unproductive environment where discipline (and the onus on discipline) supersedes education.

Lockdown High was originally published in 2011 and it shows. Much of Fuentes argument seems self-evident, but when this book was written and researched, it probably did not look so obvious. Fuentes closes by emphasizing the importance of less-draconian interventions such as therapy and counseling, which is an essential point to reiterate as frequently as possible.

[Bob Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Annette Fuentes delivers, in a journalistic style, a survey of the many ways in which our society’s pinhole-focus on security in schools undermines many of the principles we would hold even more dear, if only the trade-offs were made more explicit instead of hiding behind fear-mongering. Who would really want to submit to retina scanning and identification to visit their child’s school, especially if they knew that this wouldn’t stop an actual predator? Who would support white and black children, misbehaving in the same way, receiving drastically different punishments not only from their schools but also from the school police (besides the enemies of civil society, I mean)? Who would want their local School Resource Officer to patrol with more firearms than one man can use, jumpy and ready to blow away the first hint of trouble? A further shocker dealt with here is the way in which so many private companies make so much money providing valueless services to scared school boards, but I think the question “Who would want this?” is, in this situation, less a rhetorical ploy than a fundamental issue with our society. The point of the book is straightforward, and delivered with a fine style and supported by a good range of examples and sources: when we let ourselves belief that safety from students above all other things is the issue to deal with in our schools, we ignore the consequences of our actions: less education, more criminalization of otherwise reformable youth, more fear, more racism, and more danger to students from law enforcement. Fuentes’s book clearly makes the point that anti-drug, zero-tolerance, security-focused policies are not working for America’s students, they are working for politicians both cynical and guileless and for exploitative private corporations. Most striking in this book is the story of Columbine High School’s reaction to Columbine: sensible, calm, and safe. Perhaps schools in American should learn from the aftermath to that horrible day instead of those few horrifying minutes.

[Nick Huntington-Klein · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't realize when I picked it up that I'd fallen to the siren song of "social-science-by-journalist" once again. Usually with that kind of book it is at least well written, if poorly argued and sourced. This one wasn't even particularly well written.

I was very interested to read about the topic, but the approach here was unfocused and came off as a string of repetition, anecdotes, and tangents (like, yeah, gun control is an important topic to think about in relation to Columbine, but doesn't really relate to your main topic and that's a big tangent to spend a bunch of time on at the beginning of the book). Add to that the cocktail-party theorizing backed up with vague references to studies that the author may or may not have accurately interpreted endemic to "social-science-by-journalist" and I couldn't make it all the way through this one.

[Samuel Lubell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting, but at times it was just a collection of incidents without a unifying argument. No conclusion. The best chapter was on all the people profiting from the increase in school security and all the lies they tell to justify it.

[Robert Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a real eye opener into just how crazy the application or rules can be in the school system. It's truly scarey to see how judgement has been thrown out the window in favor of political correctness and fear mongering.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good resource for those looking at the school-to-prison pipeline, but the author puts a bit too much hope in gun control.