Hiring Mercenaries to Police Schools Teaches Compliance

Because when you use a bunch of armed mercenaries to police public high schools, what could possibly go wrong?

At 9 a.m. on the morning of October 31, 2012, students at Vista Grande High School in Casa Grande were settling in to their daily routine when something unusual occurred.

Vista Grande High School Principal Tim Hamilton ordered the school -- with a student population of 1,776 -- on "lock down," kicking off the first "drug sweep" in the school's four-year history. According to Hamilton, "lock down" is a state in which, "everybody is locked in the room they are in, and nobody leaves -- nobody leaves the school, nobody comes into the school."


"Everybody is locked in, and then they bring the dogs in, and they are teamed with an administrator and go in and out of classrooms. They go to a classroom and they have the kids come out and line up against a wall. The dog goes in and they close the door behind, and then the dog does its thing, and if it gets a hit, it sits on a bag and won't move."

While such "drug sweeps" have become a routine matter in many of the nation's schools, along with the use of metal detectors and zero-tolerance policies, one feature of this raid was unusual. According to Casa Grande Police Department (CGPD) Public Information Officer Thomas Anderson, four "law enforcement agencies" took part in the operation: CGPD (which served as the lead agency and operation coordinator), the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Gila River Indian Community Police Department, and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

It is the involvement of CCA -- the nation's largest private, for-profit prison corporation -- that causes this high school "drug sweep" to stand out as unusual; CCA is not, despite CGPD's evident opinion to the contrary, a law enforcement agency.

"To invite for-profit prison guards to conduct law enforcement actions in a high school is perhaps the most direct expression of the 'schools-to-prison pipeline' I've ever seen," said Caroline Isaacs, program director of the Tucson office of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker social justice organization that advocates for criminal justice reform.

"All the research shows that CCA doesn't properly train its staff to do the jobs they actually have. They most certainly do not have anywhere near the training and experience--to say nothing of the legal authority--to conduct a drug raid on a high school," Isaacs added. "It is chilling to think that any school official would be willing to put vulnerable students at risk this way."

Hey, we're sending teachers into tough schools these days with only five weeks of training; why not use poorly trained police officers while we're at it?

Aside from the savings, there's a great ancillary benefit for our authoritarian overclass in all this: it teaches that questionable authority figures must still be deferred to at all times. It's one thing to comply with the directions of a duly deputized agent of the law who has been fully trained and is subject to multiple layers of oversight from many levels of the government. It's quite another to be forced to follow the whims of a marginally trained rent-a-cop who is regulated only by the marketplace.

This is the blind obedience corporate America craves. And it's a lot easier to accept the idea that you surrender your rights to your boss when you take a job after you've learned that you surrender your rights to someone who isn't an officer of the law when you walk into your school.

Just another study group, learning what it means to be an American...