Editor’s Introduction: Crime, Crime Prevention, and Punishment in Schools

• Author: Aaron Kupchik
• Published date: 01 August 2010
• Date: 01 August 2010
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1043986210369287
• Subject Matter: Articles

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice
26(3) 252 –253
Editor’s Introduction:
© 2010 SAGE Publications
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Crime, Crime Prevention,
DOI: 10.1177/1043986210369287
http://ccj.sagepub.com
and Punishment in Schools
The massacre at Columbine High School, in which 14 students and 1 teacher died,
provoked widespread fear and came to symbolize the worst-case scenario of school
violence. It has also served as a rallying cry for school administrators who vow to
do all they can to prevent such a tragedy from happening at their schools. Though
this event has been a powerful spark for both fear of school crime and school security,
growth in both phenomena predates the 1999 massacre. As an example, consider the
1994 Safe Schools Act, which required public schools to expel for at least 1 year any
student bringing a weapon to school or else lose their federal funding, thus begin-
ning many schools’ zero-tolerance policies. Currently, police or security guards are
present in the majority of public high schools, a growing number of schools use
strategies like random searches with drug-sniffing police dogs or metal detector
searches, and some form of zero-tolerance policy is nearly universal among public
schools in the United States.
The massive changes in school discipline and security in recent years raises many
questions that have received relatively little attention among criminologists. This
issue of Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice thus fills an important void in
the literature by addressing a few such questions. Four of the five articles that follow—
those written by Nicole Bracy, Michael Krezmien et al., Edward Morris, and Yasser
Payne and Tara Brown—consider consequences of contemporary school discipline
and security: issues such as students’ constitutional rights, increases in arrests tak-
ing place at school, the rise of an “antisnitching” code among students, and the
alienation of...