Watch out for flying pudding and handcuffs

Next time you’re in a school cafeteria and a food fight breaks out, you better watch out. No, not for flying food or rowdy students – for the riot squad that might be called in to round kids up and arrest them.

CHICAGO — The food fight here started the way such bouts do in school lunchrooms most anywhere: an apple was tossed, a cookie turned into a torpedo, and an orange plunked someone in the head. Within minutes, dozens of middle-school students had joined in the ruckus, and spattered adults were ducking for cover.

By the end of the day, 25 of the students, ages 11 to 15, had been rounded up, arrested, taken from school and put in jail. A spokesman for the Chicago police said the charges were reckless conduct, a misdemeanor.

That was last Thursday afternoon. Now parents are questioning what seem to them like the criminalization of age-old adolescent pranks, and the lasting legal and psychological impact of the arrests.

“My children have to appear in court,” Erica Russell, the mother of two eighth-grade girls who spent eight hours in jail, said Tuesday. “They were handcuffed, slammed in a wagon, had their mug shots taken and treated like real criminals.”

“They’re all scared,” Ms. Russell said of the two dozen arrested students. “You never know how children will be impacted by that. I was all for some other kind of punishment, but not jail. Who hasn’t had a food fight?”

Even South Park would’ve found this extreme. Guess it ain’t after all.

I’d tell the parents to get their young ones out of that draconian place at once. Food fights are a rightful cause for some punishment, but any school that allows kids to be jailed for throwing pudding is not an institution anyone’s children should be in or near.

(via The Agitator)
Technorati tags: food fights · police · injustices