ACLU's win should be a warning to colleges and universities
Today, in a class-action lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the ACLU of
Eastern Missouri, a federal district court told a Missouri college to
end its unconstitutional program of requiring all of its
students—irrespective of their course of study—to submit to
suspicionless drug-testing. Jason Williamson, staff attorney at the
ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project, and co-counsel on the case, said:
"Linn State required every incoming student to be tested for drugs,
even though many of them would not be engaged in dangerous activities,
and the college had no reason to believe any particular student was
using drugs. Any student who refused to submit to the drug test—which is
considered a search under the Fourth Amendment—would be denied the
opportunity to pursue their education at Linn State.
"Students should not be required to sacrifice their constitutional
rights in order to further their education, and we're thrilled that the
court has struck down the policy. Our victory should serve as a warning
to colleges and universities across the country: mandatory,
suspicionless drug testing of the entire student body has no place in
education.”
Read on...
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Showing posts with label students. Show all posts
Showing posts with label students. Show all posts
8 Years In Prison for a Harmless Prank? Handcuffed for Doodling? The Increasing Criminalization of Students
Young people are being suspended, expelled and charged with criminal offenses for behavior as innocuous as doodling on a desk.
A few months back, 18-year-old Tyell Morton was enjoying his senior year at Rushville High in Indiana. Today, he faces the prospect of being labeled a felon for the rest of his life for a harmless senior prank.
Morton was arrested for putting a blowup doll in a bathroom stall on the last day of school. He was caught when video footage showed a man entering the high school in a hooded sweatshirt and leaving a package in the bathroom. Fearing the package might be a bomb, school officials evacuated the premises and called the Indiana State bomb squad. Although no one was injured, no property damaged and no dangerous materials found, Morton, who had not been in any trouble prior to this incident, is being charged with disorderly conduct (a misdemeanor) and institutional criminal mischief (a class C felony), carrying the potential of two to eight years in prison.
Are Students the New Indentured Servants?
By Jeffrey J. Williams, Dissent Magazine. Posted February 5, 2009.
College student-loan debt has revived the spirit of indenture for a sizable proportion of contemporary Americans.
When we think of the founding of the early colonies, we usually think of the journey to freedom, in particular of the Puritans fleeing religious persecution to settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But it was not so for a majority of the first Europeans who emigrated to these shores. "Between one-half and two-thirds of all white immigrants to the British colonies arrived under indenture,” according to the economic historian David W. Galenson, a total of three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand people. Indenture was not an isolated practice but a dominant aspect of labor and life in early America.
Rather than Plymouth, Jamestown was a more typical example of colonial settlement, founded in 1607 as a mercantile venture under the auspices of the Virginia Company, a prototype of "joint-stock” corporations and venture capitalism. The first colonists fared badly because, coming primarily from gentry, they had little practical skill at farming and were ravaged by starvation and disease. In 1620, the Virginia Company shifted to a policy of indentured servitude to draw labor fit to work the tobacco colonies. Indenture had been a common practice in England, but its terms were relatively short, typically a year, and closely regulated by law. The innovation of the Virginia Company was to extend the practice of indenture to America, but at a much higher obligation, of four to seven years, because of the added cost of transit, and also because of the added cost of the brokerage system that arose around it. In England, contracts of indenture were directly between the landowner and servant, whereas now merchants or brokers in England’s ports signed prospective workers, then sold the contracts to shippers or to colonial landowners upon the servants’ arrival in America, who in turn could re-sell the contracts.
Read on...
College student-loan debt has revived the spirit of indenture for a sizable proportion of contemporary Americans.
When we think of the founding of the early colonies, we usually think of the journey to freedom, in particular of the Puritans fleeing religious persecution to settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But it was not so for a majority of the first Europeans who emigrated to these shores. "Between one-half and two-thirds of all white immigrants to the British colonies arrived under indenture,” according to the economic historian David W. Galenson, a total of three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand people. Indenture was not an isolated practice but a dominant aspect of labor and life in early America.
Rather than Plymouth, Jamestown was a more typical example of colonial settlement, founded in 1607 as a mercantile venture under the auspices of the Virginia Company, a prototype of "joint-stock” corporations and venture capitalism. The first colonists fared badly because, coming primarily from gentry, they had little practical skill at farming and were ravaged by starvation and disease. In 1620, the Virginia Company shifted to a policy of indentured servitude to draw labor fit to work the tobacco colonies. Indenture had been a common practice in England, but its terms were relatively short, typically a year, and closely regulated by law. The innovation of the Virginia Company was to extend the practice of indenture to America, but at a much higher obligation, of four to seven years, because of the added cost of transit, and also because of the added cost of the brokerage system that arose around it. In England, contracts of indenture were directly between the landowner and servant, whereas now merchants or brokers in England’s ports signed prospective workers, then sold the contracts to shippers or to colonial landowners upon the servants’ arrival in America, who in turn could re-sell the contracts.
Read on...
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