‘Rewards’ Becoming the 4th ‘R’

Today’s topic, class, is ethics: If somebody offered you $50, would you be more inclined to turn in a fellow student who did something wrong?

Try this pop quiz on Mrs. Foley’s freshman English class, and not a single hand goes up. But ask them if they think somebody else can be bought, and hardly a hand stays down. Everybody knows somebody who would turn informant in exchange for a trip to the Gap.

“People are greedy,” says Charlaina Hughes, a 15-year-old freshman with a blond pixie haircut.

Police are banking on that. In this quaint resort community where the Piscataqua River meets the North Atlantic, local police and Portsmouth High School officials have come up with a crime-fighting program that includes one eye-popping component: Report wrongdoing, win valuable prizes.

The program has yet to go into effect, but ever since the school board approved it last June the town has been debating the morality of using cash to coax kids into doing the right thing. The amounts, ranging from $10 to $100, would be left to a special panel of students.

“Oh, God, it’s been crazy,” said Mary Carey Foley, the English teacher and student liaison who will be responsible for fielding anonymous tips from young informants. “You wouldn’t believe the [debate]. The local paper had a cartoon with a valedictorian, salutatorian and a snitch-atorian.”

As unusual and, as some critics contend, as cynical as the program seems, scores of other high schools are offering similar cash incentives, from Fresno to Boulder, Colo., to Amarillo, Texas. In the last year, Baton Rouge, La., and Albuquerque have added the program and Charlotte, N.C., expanded it from a handful of schools to all the high schools and even down to the middle schools--53 campuses in all.

In Charlotte, tens of thousands of posters and stickers cover the campuses with an Orwellian logo: a pair of eyes, some of them with the paranoia-inducing warning “Who’s watching?” followed by a hotline number. Police credit the program with solving a recent homicide, recovering a couple of stolen cars and letting authorities intercept a knife-concealing kid who’d bragged to friends that he intended to eviscerate a teacher.

Other places are tempting students to report campus crime with T-shirts, gift certificates, pizzas, autographed baseballs and other things coveted by young consumers, said Mary Parker, a criminologist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The logical extension, she said, will be for schools to move these programs into increasingly lower grades, reflecting a perception that ever younger children are exposed or inclined to criminal behavior, and that desperate times call for drastic measures.

Such well-meaning bribery takes many forms. Parents of punctual children were in an uproar when Oregon’s Multnomah County recently decided to pay parents of chronically truant students $3 for every full day of classes their kids attended and $1 for each half day. Parker said some schools offer rewards to entire classes if, say, they collectively cut down on playground incidents or absenteeism.

She said programs like the one adopted in Portsmouth are simply copies of programs already in place in the adult world.

Just a Matter of Community Policing

“It’s not a system of snitching or ratting, per se,” Parker said. “It’s just the citizens of that community policing that community. Does it work? People are caught. I would suggest that, yes, there is some benefit.”

Yet many others find the concept of using money to modify student behavior theoretically unsound and ethically appalling. The atmosphere it creates is the wrong one, said University of Maryland criminologist Denise Gottfredson, coauthor of a congressional report on juvenile crime and a leading authority on school-based crime prevention.

“The kind of school environment that is conducive to positive school behavior is one in which students feel they belong and trust one another,” she said.

Oddly, the program in Portsmouth shares its roots with such titillating television shows as “America’s Most Wanted.” Both are offshoots of the popular Crime Stoppers community crime-watch program, which was thought up by an Albuquerque police officer in 1976 and since has spread to hundreds of towns. Typically, a crime is advertised and people with information can call in anonymously and, if the tip results in a conviction, claim an award.

The school-based offshoot was the brainchild of Larry Wieda, a Boulder police investigator who got high schools there to adopt the idea in 1983. “The bottom line is, let’s get into the real world here, folks,” he said.

A 1986 National Institute of Justice study found that Crime Stoppers programs resulted in an average 6.5% increase in crimes solved in communities that used those programs, but the jury remains out on whether they prevent crime. Such programs may be good to catch a high-profile serial criminal but probably not to cure a widespread social problem like drug use, said Dennis Rosenbaum, a coauthor of the NIJ study and head of the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Weighing Negative Effects on Society

“You may have some beneficial effect, but is it worth creating the fear and mistrust and other possible negative effects that you introduce into that environment?” he said. “If we continue in that direction, then we will have a society that consists of gates and cameras and anonymous reporting.”

In fact, the hottest trend in school crime prevention is closed-circuit camera systems, said Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center in Westlake Village, Calif. Nevada’s Clark County schools recently put in an elaborate system designed by the firm that wires the surveillance video at Las Vegas casinos.

Grim as the Crime Stoppers programs seem, in many cases they provide a necessary mechanism for students to pass on information, he said. Stephens said he conducted a survey at a school in Texas the day after two students were shot and found that 54 had known a kid had come to school with a pistol that day. “It was the typical code of silence,” he said.

The idea of putting adult-style crime programs into the schools fits into the broader trend toward treating kids with adult gloves. Even before the schoolyard killings in Jonesboro, Ark., in March --in which the alleged killers of five people were two boys, ages 11 and 13--most states already had changed their laws to make it easier to prosecute juveniles as adults. Many states have thrown out their minimum age of adult prosecution.

The campus anti-crime programs are dependent on getting kids to turn each other in, and that remains one of the great youth taboos, even in colleges.

In the past three years, Colgate, Georgetown and Drew universities tried to pass honor codes that included an obligation for students to report cheating, but in each case ethics committees backed down in the face of student opposition.

Colgate officials were so disheartened by a student vote against the honor code that the university dropped out of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, a consortium dedicated to promoting ethics at the nation’s institutes of higher learning, according to center Director Sally Cole.

Duke--which is among several universities nationwide with a Crime Stoppers-style program--itself passed an honor code in 1993 that requires students to report cheating but not necessarily name the cheater. Cole said there is a movement underway to strike even that lenient provision.

One reason may be that students cheat more than they used to, said Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University associate provost who has studied honor codes and cheating for several years. Not only do they do it more, but they are more likely to rationalize it, with many arguing that they do it because everybody does it, he said.

Earlier this year, an insurance industry study found that people in their 20s were far more likely to overstate an insurance claim than older people and to believe there was nothing wrong with that.

McCabe said he has just begun researching cheating at the high school level, and the things he’s hearing from his focus groups are similarly disturbing. “I had 19 high school students, and all admitted to some cheating,” he said. “It’s just not a big deal. I think they’re relating that to what they see is going on in the greater society.”

Getting Involved in Curbing Cheating

It’s a big deal to Katie Berounsky, a sternly serious student in Foley’s English class. She goes into the girls’ restroom and it’s covered with cigarette ashes, and she’d like to see the school do something about it. Last year, she even went to a teacher and reported somebody who had been cheating on a test that she also was taking.

She said she supports the school’s Crime Stoppers-style program because maybe it will make people behave better, since nothing else seems to be working. “Kids don’t seem to learn,” she said.

Reactions among other students were naturally mixed. Students with good reputations were worried about being blamed as a snitch even if they weren’t, while students with less sparkling standings fretted about being framed for something they didn’t do.

Others questioned how something could be anonymous since the perpetrators of a campus crime would likely know who saw them do it.

School officials plan to introduce the program to the student body at an assembly in two weeks. Foley already has chosen a 12-member student committee that will be charged with setting the reward amounts. She said students from the Drama Club likely will engage in some role-playing to show students how the program will work.

If someone sprays graffiti on a wall or pinches a jacket from a locker, Foley will advertise it on bulletin boards or in the school paper. She will have her own hotline that students can call. The hope is that the anonymous nature of the program will eliminate the stigma attached to tattling, she said.

“Everyone is thinking how awful that is, that a kid would snitch on another one,” she said. “It’s an unspoken code. You just don’t do it. Socially, it isn’t a cool thing to do.”

It’s sort of cool in Charlotte. The student surveillance is so successful that authorities have difficulty raising enough money to keep up with the thousands of dollars in awards that are being paid out, said Charlotte police investigator David Wilson, the local police coordinator.

“Kids are reporting stuff that happened off campus,” Wilson said. “That’s never happened before.”

In Charlotte, a kid makes a call, gives a tip and gets a code number, Wilson said. If the information pans out, the informant can call back and identify him or herself with the code number. Wilson gives them a few locations to choose for the money exchange with a cop.

“We make the payoff, they sign the code number and they leave,” Wilson said. Wilson said the top prize so far has been $400 paid out to somebody who led police to the perpetrator of an auditorium fire.

What happens if, say, the prosecutor needs the tipster’s testimony in court to make a case against the suspect? “Well,” Wilson said, “that’s too bad, because we don’t know.”

Such programs are all part of the perennial groping by schools to have something in place that they can point to in case a particularly bad crime occurs, said Gary Marx, senior assistant executive director of the American Assn. of School Administrators. “What schools want is a safe and orderly environment, and they’re looking for techniques to attain that.”

In Portsmouth, a city of 25,000, school officials say minor drug use, hooliganism and the occasional pinched jacket are the extent of the crime problem. Yet the school is a petri dish of voguish initiatives. DARE, PAL, PRIDE, STAR, PEEP and COPS are among the alphabet soup of acronyms aimed at keeping students on the straight and narrow. Athletes, for example, must sign contracts swearing off alcohol, drugs and tobacco.

The school also recently adopted a plagiarism code in an attempt to regulate the latest trend in misbehavior: the propensity for students to sign their names to some piece of research they’ve found on the Internet. If it’s determined that somebody did indeed download someone else’s work, Principal Rick Gremlitz said, a notation to that effect goes into the student’s permanent record (yes, there really is one), which could hurt their college prospects.

Out in the parking lot, where the caste and clique system takes on Darwinian selectivity, the reactions to yet another program were greeted with a collective shrug.

Bob Gemas and his group, kids who take on the protective coloring of post-punk nihilists, are not fans of the hotline crime program.

Gemas stopped playing hacky sack for a moment to pick up his leather jacket and point to the rows of spiked metal studs. “They banned these, but after a while they just stopped enforcing it.”

He fingered the heavy chain with the Master lock around his neck. “They banned chains,” he said. “They banned beepers. As soon as they make a rule, they stop enforcing it.”

The latest rule, he said, is just that. “It’s just another dumb idea.”