Swat Team Captain Might Want to Rethink Bottom Line

When Orange County Assemblyman Mickey Conroy, first introduced his paddling bill a couple years ago, I agreed to support it if he added an amendment. Namely, that the paddling not be limited to youthful graffiti offenders but be expanded to include wayward public officials as well. The amendment was not offered and, after much anguishing, I tearfully concluded I could not vote for the bill.

Then someone reminded me I wasn’t in the Assembly and that it didn’t really matter what I thought. Alas, I was forced to carp from the outside.

Now, Conroy is back with two more bills and, more important, a few more Republicans in the Assembly. Things haven’t looked this promising for spankings in quite some time.

One of the bills would allow paddling of graffiti vandals (again, only juveniles!), while the other would allow public schools to reintroduce corporal punishment.

No, there’s nothing really new under the sun about corporal punishment. There isn’t any conclusive evidence that reinstating it will make this a better world. Plenty of school administrators and teachers oppose it. The only difference is we have some new legislators who might see a vote for it as a junior varsity version of being “tough on crime.”

Very few people in civilized society want the bad guys to go unpunished, whether they’re side-street killers or schoolyard bullies. The debate comes not over whether to punish, but how.

An aide to Conroy was quoted as saying the assemblyman relates the increase in violence to the banning of corporal punishment 10 years ago. It would make as much sense to peg it to 1963, the year in which “Leave It to Beaver” first went off the air.

Conroy, 68, grew up in a country where school reprimands carried more weight than they do today. The standard refrain in his day was the parental warning that trouble at school meant twice as much trouble waiting at home.

That describes only a part of America in 1996.

For starters, as many as half the students in a given class may have only one parent at home. Second, parents are just as likely to support their child as support the school district. Conroy’s bill acknowledges as much, allowing for parents to approve the spanking. Given that, what’s the point? What’s the value of having the school hand out the punishment as a proxy for parents? If the parents favor spanking, why not do it at home and eliminate the middleman?

The answer, presumably, is that corporal punishment at school is more immediate and will deter other students. Like the death penalty, it has a certain logic to it: Students will see their classmates carted off to the spanking chamber and, presto, will be so impressed by the threat that they will never act up again.

No doubt, some would. My guess is, those would be the same kids who wouldn’t get into trouble in the first place. They already have a healthy respect for authority, and the threat of being whacked would reinforce it.

It’s the other group I’m worried about. How about the student who has little or no respect for authority, who already has a chip on his shoulder for various sins against him, real or imagined? Does Conroy know about kids like that, and does he really think a swatting by a principal is going to straighten out that kid?

More likely, I’d say, is that humiliating a kid like that is going to put that principal at risk by pushing a troubled kid over the edge. An angry kid in 1960 couldn’t do much to a teacher except slug him. I don’t need to tell you what an angry kid today can do.

What principal, with or without life insurance paid up, is going to get physical with a troubled student? For that matter, why should he? Giving a kid extra homework may upset him, but laying hands on him could set him off.

No school official would risk a confrontation like that. They’d spare the rod on students like that and use it only for the kids from whom they wouldn’t fear retaliation. And what signal would that send to other students?

This is one of those bills that should be dismantled before it blows up and hurts someone. Even if nine of every 10 applications of corporal punishment has a positive effect, the repercussions from one bad situation could have tragic consequences.

Let’s hope our law-and-order legislators do their homework. They frequently accuse their liberal counterparts of not living in the real world. Before voting for Conroy’s bill, they should ask themselves if they’d paddle an angry, disruptive kid whose father has a pearl-handled .45 holstered at home.

Mickey Conroy, retired Marine, wishes we lived in a world where an extra 50 push-ups or a lap around the barracks would snap you into shape. Or, where a swat on the seat from the principal would straighten you up.

So do I.

Too bad we don’t.

Dana Parsons’ columns appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.