Posted on 04/05/2022 5:22:05 PM PDT by grundle
When Carlos got pinched by the fuzz, he was holding some hot commodities.
Flaming hot, in fact.
No, that's not slang. The illegal behavior that landed Carlos (not his real name), a ninth-grade student at a high school in the southern suburbs of Chicago, in the deans' office on a mid-September morning in 2019 was the illicit sale of chips to one of his fellow students. For the crime, he was summarily sentenced to a one-day suspension from school—and his mother was called to pick him up.
As Karlyn Gorski, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago, relates in a paper recently published in the journal Youth & Society, Carlos is just one small part of a robust black market for snack foods that persists at Hamilton High (not the school's real name) despite the best efforts by school administrators, security guards, and teachers to stamp it out. The punishment handed out to Carlos for his busted chip-deal was actually a light sentence, Gorski explains, with administrators granting leniency on the grounds that Carlos was a freshman and might not yet understand the school's zero-tolerance policy for unapproved exercises of snack-related capitalism. Repeat offenders, she writes, faced in-school suspensions—the high school equivalent of solitary confinement.
Gorski spent 112 days observing students and adults at Hamilton during the 2019–2020 school year, though her research was cut short by the school's closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While there, she observed a widespread black market for snack sales. The perpetrators were mere children, but they organized "elaborate strategies to hide sales, build networks of sellers, and develop a verbal shorthand around the market."
By outlawing the sale of snacks, the school ensured that only outlaws would sell snacks.
Enforcement of the snack-selling ban was robust, with security guards even relying on the use of mounted cameras to identify perpetrators so they could be hauled out of class and reprimanded.
"I had to go get him out of class, send him to the dean, do the whole thing," one security guard—pseudonymously monikered "Karen"—told Gorski. Punishing a student for a victimless crime was apparently more important than whatever he might have learned in class that day.
But beyond the amusing anecdotes about deception and the heroic struggles of would-be entrepreneurs against the school snack cops, the paper contains some serious implications about what the school is teaching its students. "Adult responses to youth behaviors can produce a stigma of deviance around activities that, in other contexts, are permitted or even lauded," Gorski explains.
Within the school environment, not all snack sales were illicit. Students in a Spanish club selling cookies to raise money for a field trip to Peru were allowed to "carry their wares openly and advertise on posters throughout the school," writes Gorski. "Sellers working for their own gain did not have the luxury of such promotion. When the profits of snack sales benefitted organizations that fell under the school's purview, they were lauded; the school retained control over the proceeds, ensuring the money went to something 'worthy.'"
By contrast, when students were caught "selling" by teachers and administrators, their motives were "subject to moral scrutiny," writes Gorski, who described an incident in which one teacher told a student that selling snacks to fund the purchase of a new pair of shoes was a "poor use" of resources.
The students at Hamilton, a majority of whom are minorities and roughly 80 percent from low-income households, had no trouble deconstructing the school's unequal treatment of the same economic activities. One student, code-named Lucas, told Gorski that "they're basically training us for a fake world" in which good behavior is rewarded while trying to make a buck is regarded as valuable only if the seller's intentions are worthy.
"Adults thus undermined their own disciplinary apparatus by demonstrating its unfairness," concludes Gorski. "With consequences so irregularly applied, and the activities they aimed to prohibit so mandate…it made more sense to disregard the prohibition and enjoy the rewards of buying and selling treats."
The high school snack policies that are the subject of Gorski's paper form an eerily effective microcosm of similar arrangements in other parts of the world. Prohibition, which banned the serving of alcohol in the United States for more than a decade in the early 20th century, produced a black market that kept the booze flowing to those who had access to the necessary money and connections. Drug prohibition has produced many of the same outcomes.
Gorski points to an even more pernicious parallel: prisons, where the passing of illegal goods ranging from cigarettes to hard drugs is similarly handled via a black market. Indeed, the government can't even keep drugs out of prisons—how could the drug war be anything but a failure everywhere else?
Still, treating innocuous behavior as criminal forces students to behave more like criminals in order to continue engaging in the market. Those patterns are the opposite of what schools should be teaching.
"Through their disciplinary apparatuses, schools not only punish deviance or delinquency—they produce it," Gorski argues.
A few days after Carlos was busted for his illegal snack sales, Gorski reported that the student was the target of profiling by the school's security guards, who approached him as he arrived at Hamilton one morning.
"They asked me if I was selling, and I said 'nah' cause I stopped," Carlos told the researcher.
Had he learned his lesson? Well, yes, actually.
"But they don't know," he told Gorski with a smirk, "that my two employees are still selling."
“Would you like some Pringles? I know a guy!”
Some people never learn.
An astonishing percentage of them become teachers.
L
The urge to control. Everything.
Dang. I can remember the days of selling candy bars out of my locker for our HS sorority.
My daughter had a candy selling business in grade school.
The school shut her down so much for allowing a child learning about business.
“Would you like some Pringles? I know a guy!”
I know him. His name is Cheetoh.
Or you can go pay twice the price a the medical snack dispensary.
Guess they never heard of prohibition, or rationing of food and other items during WWII, or the speak-easys, illegal liquor production, and black markets, etc., that came about because of them. Even the military has had its own share of black markets. When my brother was in Vietnam, he wrote about the black markets there.
“The urge to control. Everything.”
The precise summary of the day.
Trying to expand behavior control over a substance never works, and serves only as a price support for the smuggling.
Whether it's opiates, sugar, booze, cigarettes or Doritos, if you make it illegal, you instantly create a market demand.
Consider. Suppose they waved a magic wand and made heroin something anyone could buy at true cost of manufacture? Say $5 per lb? There would be a spike as all the users killed themselves. Who died? And were any of them on the verge of curing cancer? No great loss.
It's all about keeping the thugs in the DEA, FBI, and police departments nationwide gainfully employed, with federal price controls, and LEOs with bass boats and summer cabins.
I don't know how she reacted. But, I would've been quite proud of him, if I were his mother.
Some students were allowed to ‘carry their wares openly!’
I used to work in an urban school in the south. They had a black kid named Bobby Lee that would buy chip packs from Walmart and sell the chip packs for 50 cents each.
They took him back to his car and found 10 backpacks full of chips. The kids would unlock his trunk, grab a backpack and sell, and Bobby would make half the cut.
He eventually became a rap music producer in Memphis.
I used to sell Charms lollipops for 10 cents each. Bought them for a nickel and resold at school for 10 cents. Didn’t realize that made me a criminal by today’s standards.
Cinnamon tooth picks. Easy to make.
Pssst, come-ere...
I got busted for selling cinnamon oil toothpicks in the 4th grade. Principal called my mother who thought nothing wrong since she knew I was doing it and was the one who bought the oil.
Yet one more reason to disband government schools.
They are just more and more like government prisons.
My high school has been transformed into a massive windowless complex. Looks like a prison. We had a great olympic pool and one side was doors and windows all the way up, great natural light. I lifeguarded there in the summer.
Its all brick wall now.
Heard there was a really bad dude called corn pop selling breakfast cereals
#17.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.