Controversies over “zero tolerance” have exploded recently in two very distinct contexts: the Trump administration’s policy for undocumented border-crossers, dramatized most starkly in its separation of migrant children from their parents, and the #MeToo debate over how firm policies should be toward men who press themselves on women, highlighted by liberals’ torment over the resignation of Senator Al Franken.
Zero tolerance controversies pop up in other places as well, such as over strict drug and alcohol policy (should one lapse lose a worker his or her job?), enforcement of discipline in schools (is it creating a school-to-jail pipeline?), and the “broken windows” policing strategy (is alienating a community a long-term losing strategy for law enforcement?).
Across a wide range of public policies, however, Americans do not support zero tolerance–even when American lives are stake. Indeed, it is not clear that societies could function well with zero tolerance.
How Much a Life?
An easy example of how we don’t really believe in zero tolerance is traffic law enforcement. (See this earlier post.) Many American lives, as well as property, legal expenses, work time, and more, would be saved if speed limits were enforced with zero tolerance. But Americans would revolt. Indeed, when local authorities use surveillance cameras to, in effect, enact zero tolerance for, say, running stop signs–and the cameras do save lives–citizens protest. So, police loosely (and sometimes in discriminatory ways) enforce traffic laws. Americans are content with greater-than-zero-tolerance, so long as there is some enforcement, some limit on speeding, some control of traffic.
Similarly, we resist zero tolerance for safety regulation. Our rhetoric states that every life is priceless, but we do not mean it. Courts settle wrongful death cases with specific dollars per victim; bureaucracies debate, calculate, and recalculate how much a life is worth; and families of the victims of 9/11 received compensation based on the deceased’s earnings. We continue to allow the use of chemicals that are known to damage brains and cause cancers, so long as the level of harm is “acceptable.” Saving lives is priced against the cost and inconvenience of zero tolerance.
We don’t contest these practices except at the margins. Unions and lawsuits press more safety even if it means higher costs to employers while businesses (and presumably customers) prefer less safety at lower costs. But nobody really pushes zero tolerance.
The Controversial Cases
For decades, America’s southern border was permeable. If someone cared enough, he or she could cross illicitly and make good money picking fruit or doing similar work. Most went home after the season to rejoin their families and then repeated the process the next year. This leaky system worked for the laborers, employers, American consumers, and, as long as it didn’t get out of hand, the authorities. Then, as sociologist Douglas Massey has well argued and documented (see “Why Border Enforcement Backfired”), in the 1970s and 1980s U.S. policy shifted toward strict and expensive enforcement, and shifted closer to zero tolerance. The result: Persistent migrants still found their way across the border and into jobs, but no longer risked crossing back and forth seasonally. They settled down north of the border and they brought their families over–as in “Dreamers”–or formed new families. The U.S. ended up with 10 million-plus “illegal aliens” in residence. (Malcolm Gladwell has an excellent podcast on this story.)
Political scientist Peter Andreas has written that “‘regaining control’ of the border is pure mythology — there was never a golden age of territorial control. The country has always had highly porous borders … [T]he U.S.-Mexico border is actually far more intensively policed, patrolled, regulated, managed and monitored than it ever has been.” And all that was even before zero tolerance came to mean taking children from their parents.
We are in the midst of figuring what zero tolerance means in the #MeToo movement. Just about everybody (or everybody unenthralled by Donald Trump) believes that the pre-Harvey Weinstein level of tolerance for sexual aggression was far, far too lenient–excused as “boys will be boys,” or “locker room banter,” or “she must have asked for it.” At the moment, Americans, almost unanimously in one recent poll, agree that a “zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment is essential.” Yet a debate has broken out over what constitutes sexual harassment and how such zero tolerance should be enforced. In the same poll, three in five agreed that “victims get to decide what is and is not sexual harassment, regardless of what the accused thinks.” When the dust settles on this debate, where will the line be drawn? Certainly, physical force or economic extortion will be intolerable, but will, say, clumsy flirting, comments about dress, a hand on the shoulder? (Perversely, much gender discrimination is created by inaction and silence, such as not inviting female work colleagues to informal discussions.) I doubt that the #MeToo results will be zero tolerance.
A Broader View
It has long been a cliche in the study of organizations that they can only operate well with a bit of looseness in the application of rules. (Peter Blau wrote a classic study in 1955.) Achieving larger goals sometimes means going outside of official channels and may require using shortcuts that are technical violations–so long as the rule-bending is kept within bounds. Thus, a common way that united workers can gain leverage over their bosses in an employment dispute is by working totally by the book, by exercising zero tolerance for breaking the boss’s rules, to the boss’s chagrin.
In a very different context, anthropologists who have cataloged cultural norms in societies around the world–recording, for example, which relatives are ineligible to marry, how a ritual is supposed to be done, gender roles–have long appreciated that, in practice, people everywhere, and certainly including people in societies that westerners label as “traditional,” bend or break rules when it makes pragmatic sense to do so. (A classic here is is Elizabeth Colson’s 1973 book.) There is usually a lot more than zero tolerance for deviance.
It sounds odd to say that we have important rules but we don’t really mean to totally enforce them. Social life involves much negotiation and negotiation entails flexibility. Zero is an inflexible number.
Footnote: Law professor David Levine writes that, “there is a concept in contract law called ‘substantial compliance,’ which amounts to a standard allowing for some deviation from the terms of a contract. There are contractual terms which can be used to indicate that punctilious compliance is required (e.g., ‘time is of the essence’), but otherwise the expectation is there has to be play in the joints.”
MADE IN AMERICA 