Book Review: School safety in the United States: A reasoned look at the rhetoric

• Date: 01 December 2015
• Author: Matthew James Cuellar
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016815591818
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

a long way to go in responding to intellectually disabled offenders. Various methods of implement-

ing Atkins, paired with inappropriate standards of proof, elevate the risk that an intellectually dis-

abled offender may erroneously face execution. The criminal justice system has policies in place

that prohibit the execution of the intellectually disabled. Moreover, Blackstone’s ratio contends it

is better to let 10 guilty men escape than to let 1 innocent suffer. Therefore, inconsistencies at all

levels of Atkins procedures essentially guarantee that many individuals with intellectual disabilities

are ushered to the gurney at the behest of a vengeful Lady Justice.

Tobolowsky’s research closely follows each death penalty state and how they have implemented

Atkins claims. In examining where we have been prior to Atkins and viewing a review of contem-

porary Atkins proceedings, we as a nation can understand what needs to be done to better care for the

needs of intellectually disabled offenders currently housed within the prison system. It becomes

apparent in evaluating successful and unsuccessful Atkins claims that an individual’s IQ score

should not determine whether they should live or die. One clear solution to enforce Atkins and pro-

tect the rights of individual offenders emerges: abolish the death penalty. Tobolowsky’s journey,

which began looking at the literature surrounding the Atkins claims, has ultimately put forth great

evidence supporting the end of capital punishment.

May, D. C. (2014).

School safety in the United States: A reasoned look at the rhetoric. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. xiii,

241 pp. $33.00, ISBN 978-1-61163-021-3

Reviewed by: Matthew James Cuellar, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016815591818

Although schools are generally safe places for youth today, school safety remains priority for school

administrators and policy makers in the United States. As a result of local, state, and federal efforts

to improve school safety, a growing body of literature in this area has emerged. Dr. David C. May

builds upon this body of literature in his text, School Safety in the United States: A Reasoned Look at

the Rhetoric. The purpose of this text is to provide a critical data driven analysis of school safety in

the United States. It is well organized and structured around a variety of topics in the area of school

safety presented from a scholarly perspective. It is written to a general audience and flows logically

end to end, driving the reader through a number of topics and trends that lack empirical investigation

in current school safety research. The text begins with an introductory chapter to the critical study of

school safety, which discusses what the term ‘‘school safety’’ means by exploring its definition and

recent school safety statistics. Following are 10 ‘‘stand-alone’’ chapters that discuss a number of

topics relevant to school safety, all of which are authored or coauthored by Dr. May.

The second chapter uses archival data from two national sources to investigate the prevalence of

school shootings between the years 1966 and 2013. The third chapter uses cross-sectional survey

research to examine individual- and school-level variables that influence middle and high school

students’ willingness to report gun or other weapons possession to adults. Chapter 4 uses cross-

sectional survey research to examine parental aggression against teachers with the objective of

determining its prevalence and the contextual factors associated with its occurrence. The fifth chap-

ter uses secondary data from the Mississippi Crime and Justice Research Unit to determine factors

that drive fear of crime in schools by exploring the influence of student and school-level

530 Criminal Justice Review 40(4)