Rights-Free Schools

[Hogeye]

Another letter to the editor sent to NWATimes and Morning News:


The drug nazis are not satisfied with creating the highest incarceration rate in the world, militarizing the police, and kicking in doors of peaceful Americans. Now they want to brainwash the children into surrendering their individual rights. Isn't that what government education is for?

Drug judge Mary Ann Gunn has the brilliant idea for a program called "Communities for a Rights-Free Schools Project." She hopes to urge 85% of students to surrender their rights, and allow the authorities to randomly test their bodies for drugs, and to conduct searches of lockers and vehicles, including searches using drug-sniffing dogs. The dogs promise not to smell the property of students not in the program.

Is this the way to teach human rights in school? Is this the way to instill the primacy of the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness over government power? Obviously not - this is, on the contrary, a way to teach kids subservience to the State and obedience to authority. The slogan of the program might well be: "I love Big Brother."

I suggest an alternative program called "Communities for Rights-Aware Schools." Maybe the ACLU or Institute for Justice would sponsor it. The program would have a goal of making 85% of a student body aware of their basic individual rights, such as the right to refuse a search, the right to refuse to answer government agents or incriminate themselves, and the right to use their minds and even alter their consciousness as they choose. Information about rights might include recent abrogations of rights perpetrated by government, such as the suspension of habeas corpus, covert searches, and warrentless spying.

In short, schools should be teaching students how to achieve and assert liberty, not train them to abjectly surrender it out of drug (or terrorism) hysteria.

Hogeye Bill

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Now that is one thing I can agree with Hogeye on. Our students - and their parents for that matter - need to know what their rights are and not be brainwashed into surrendering them out of fear of anything. I'm surprised at Judge Gunn. She usually is better at taking the "long view" than this. It's in the same category as Mark Pryor voting for MCA, even though he "had reservations" - short-term thinking. Not good for the country.

[Hogeye]

I'm not surprised at Judge Gunn, considering her enthusiasm for show-trials in schools. Despite its use in certain communist regimes and oriental cultures, public shaming construed as justice seems offensive to me.

Then there's my general antipathy for drug courts. They are advertised as an alternative to imprisonment. But has there been any reduction in the incarceration rate where drug courts have been tried? (No.) Has there been an increase in custodial rate - the number of people in government custody such as parole and probation? (Yes.) So the bottom line is that drug courts simply allow the State to keep more people in custody with reduced rights. It's not really an alternative to imprisonment, but an augmentation of imprisonment.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Drug courts are a response to the incarceration rate - which is higher than the state can afford. However, as long as drugs remain illegal, the enforcement agencies and the courts have their job to do and they are trying to do it. The solution isn't to damn the courts, but to change the laws. Yes, I know Hogeye has been complaining about the laws for years. Since he loudly - and proudly - refuses to vote or support anyone in the political structure, it isn't surprising they don't pay any attention to him. Those of us working within the system have made some (exceedingly limited) progress. Not good, better than nothing, and we'll keep trying.

[Hogeye]

Right, Barbara - drug courts are a response to the incarceration rate. But they have not reduced the incarceration rate one iota, they have merely allowed the State to keep more people in custody. Thus, drug courts fail at what they are intended (or were advertised as intended) to do.

We have different theories on how laws/customs/conventions are changed. I believe that such changes are driven by opinion, and that the formal legal systems sometimes eventually change as a result of public opinion. Generally, the formal legal changes occur long after the change is a "done deal" in actual practice. You apparently believe that the minority of people who vote for some issue drive change. I think you have it backwards.

Some examples: Portugal formally legalized cannabis a couple years ago, the main argument among legislators being that no one enforced those stupid laws anyway, so why have them on the books. In California (Oregon, British Colombia...) various localities simply don't enforce cannabis laws. Others do. Cannabis is effectively legal in Marin County, Humboldt County, and San Francisco (last I heard). The "book" laws don't matter.

Bottom line: I don't care whether there are cannabis prohibition laws on the books, so long as they are not enforced. I feel I am doing more to end prohibition by ignoring and ridiculing the formal laws than those who simply beg their rulers by petitioning and voting. If those stupid laws are eventually repealed, it will be because they are popularly deemed unjust and unenforceable due to people like me, and Tom Brown, and others who ignore and ridicule such laws.


Back to the subject - both NWATimes and Morning News have called to verify my authorship. So my letter should appear in the next week or so in both papers.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Laws that are on the books can be enforced. All that your examples show is that they can be enforced discriminately instead of across the board - not really helpful to the "people of color" and the "long-haired hippie" types who tend to be the victims of discriminate enforcement. The drug courts have reduced the incarceration rate - the folks "in custody" who aren't in jail are evidence of just that. Without the drug court those people would be in jail. Changes are driven by opinions translated into votes. People wouldn't vote the way they do without holding the opinion, so of course changes in the legal systems are a result of changes in public opinion. They don't change without electing people who change or remove the laws in question.

[Hogeye]

The drug courts have reduced the incarceration rate - the folks "in custody" who aren't in jail are evidence of just that. Without the drug court those people would be in jail.

Fallacious reasoning. The incarceration rate has not gone down from the year before drug courts were instituted. By having drug courts, the pigs are not forced to reduce arrests due to filled jails and prisons; instead they can merrily keep arresting people. We are comparing to rates prior to drug courts, not to what the rate would be if someone in drug court were jailed. Similarly, building the new jail simply allowed the pigs to imprison more peaceful people. I convinced some anti-prohibition people to vote against the new jail for that very reason. (...being unable to convince them not to vote.)

Of course changes in the legal systems are a result of changes in public opinion.

Right. The driving factor is opinion. When the opinions are there, the legal formalities take care of themselves, or are ignored.

Laws that are on the books can be enforced.

Right. But it is preferrable to have a law on the books that police are unwilling or unable to enforce, with people disdaining decreed law, than people submitting to decreed law and thinking it is somehow legitimate. I want a society where people have a healthy disdain for decreed law and realize that the State is a criminal organization. Then they won't fall for the next stupid law (or war) that comes along.

[Betsy]

there's another letter to the editor in today's (Friday Nov. 24) paper, against Judge Gunn's plan.

As an aside, I've heard that another judge in Fayetteville plans to drug test her own child regularly as soon as he turns 13. If true (if she was serious when she said it) then obviously both of these judges are of the mindset that testing is a good, healthy deterrent to drug use or abuse, which helps explain their decisions.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Well, testing should tell you WHICH illegal substance your child is experimenting with (remember both alcohol and tobacco are also illegal for minors). There are very few kids out there who aren't experimenting with something. Aside from putting the kid in jail or rehab, just what do they think they're going to accomplish? Kids experiment. Do your best to get them to experiment with something that won't do long-term damage. Throwing them in jail or rehab will itself do long-term damage (not to mention the damage that parental testing will do to the parent-child relationship). Kids respect the truth, but they get so little of it from adults they tend to disregard anything an adult tells them. You want to have respect from a kid? Don't ever lie to him (or her, of course - but my children were boys). The hype about drugs is so overblown that I doubt we will ever gets kids to trust us on what really is bad. So we should build more juvenile jails? Surely we can come up with something better than that. (While I am most certainly for decriminalization of drugs, I am equally against juvenile use of them - except as medication - kids get AIDS, too.)

[Hogeye]

Betsy, that was my letter - same as above with minor changes. Most likely that judge who tests his kids uses it for his own information and does not turn his kids over to the pigs.

In the Netherlands where "soft" drugs are quasi-legal, fewer kids use drugs than in the US where they are illegal. Evidently the "forbidden fruit" effect.

"Everyone" is against children using drugs. That is not the issue (except as a strawman for prohibitionists.) The issue is freedom of cognition for adults, adult ownership over their own bodies, freedom of diet ...

[Hogeye]

The letter appeared again - in last Sunday's edition of The Morning News. This time it was unedited.