• Wikipedia defines zero tolerance as "the concept of compelling persons in positions of authority, who might otherwise exercise their discretion in making subjective judgments regarding the severity of a given offense, to impose a pre-determined punishment regardless of individual culpability or 'extenuating circumstances'."

    Zero tolerance is not a constitutional concept. As an American, I do not believe that any policy held in the United States should take place completely opposite of the policy held in the constitution. The specific article I'm referring to is the presumption of innocence (innocent until proven guilty). This is a legal right that the accused have in criminal trials, but when a certain offense is under the zero tolerance policy this legal right seems to vanish. Rather than being innocent until proven guilty, the accused becomes guilty without the chance of being proven innocent. Zero tolerance allows those in authority to assume that the accused is guilty of the offense without having to look through the facts or considering any innocence.

    Most zero tolerance cases come in public schools. Zero tolerance is enforced in many policies such as bullying, drugs, alcohol, guns, threats, and other forms of violence. There are too many cases in which students are given unfair punishments without relativity to the serverity of the crime.

    This snippet comes from a USA Today article from 1999 but still relevent today:
    "Lisa Smith was an honor student, a cheerleader and a Student Council member at Lakeview Middle School in the Dallas suburbs. She played violin in the school orchestra, won awards at the science fair and had just finished a highly praised project on the Holocaust for an honors history class.

    But, one mistake later, the eighth-grader who had never known trouble faces five months in a military-style boot camp. Her offense: She violated the school's "zero tolerance" policy by bringing to school a 20-ounce bottle of Cherry 7-Up mixed with a few drops of grain alcohol.

    Under the school's policy, officials say, they were compelled to give the academic death sentence to Lisa, 14 - even if her only other trip to the principal's office was to organize an orchestra fund-raiser, even if she is, in the words of one teacher, "a sweetheart."

    Lisa Smith's case is one of a growing number of examples in which zero-tolerance policies have been attacked as inflexible, harsh and lacking in common sense. The criticisms have increased in the past two years as zero-tolerance policies have become standard operating procedure in the nation's 109,000 public schools."

    Because of only a few drops of alcohol, a simple mistake made in middle school, Lisa lost all chance of graduating high school. Lisa lost any chance of organizing beneficial events for the high school's Student Council. Lisa lost any chance of being a productive member of the high school's National Honor Society. She lost all chance of being the captain of her high school's cheerleading squad. She lost all chance of making the top ten or possibly becoming the Valedictorian of her graduating class.

    My name is Shannon Harris. I am the 2009 Valedictorian of West Morgan High School in Trinity, Alabama, and I was a victim of the strict No Tolerance policy. In March 2008, I was sentenced to the remainer of my junior year in the Morgan County Learner Center, also known as the alternative school.

    My offense fell under the category of threats. Due to the unfair treatment of students by faculty at my high school, I needed to find a way to vent my frustrations. I chose to let it out in writing. My style of writing is best formatted in fictional writing, so I turned it into a fictional story in which our town had become horribly crime-ridden and my friends and I were a group of serial killers. The story was in past tense with many differentials from reality. My mistake: I didn't change names. I was a straight A student. I'd never gotten in trouble. I was just like Lisa, but luckily the alternative school was in place. It may have been a bad experience, but at least I wasn't expelled; at least I didn't lose my chance; at least I was able to come back to high school the next year; at least one high school did't have a plastic Valedictorian without an invidual mind and opinion.