Student Arrested for Stealing Cafeteria Chicken Nuggets

Written by Te-Ping Chen, the following was originally posted on Change.org’s Criminal Justice Blog (7/21/10)

When a 15-year-old Wisconsin student was handcuffed and hauled to jail after an assistant school principal accused him of stealing $2.60 cafeteria chicken nuggets, outrage erupted. Local media outlets had a field day with the ludicrous story (charges against the teen were eventually dropped).

But if the case of the “Great Chicken Nugget Heist” had particularly absurd parameters, unfortunately, such events are far more common than most of us might like to think. We’ve written here before about the 12-year-old girl that New York cops handcuffed in her Queens classroom for doodling on a desk. (“I love my friends Abby and Faith,” the perpetrator had written before drawing a smiley face, in green Magic Marker.) And the list goes on. Right now, there are more cops patrolling the halls of New York City schools than there are monitoring Washington, DC. Or Las Vegas. Or any other number of large cities across the nation.

A January report by the Advancement Project finds that with the possible exception of actual prisoners, public schools students are the most policed population in the country. Every year, tens of thousands of students across the country are disciplined by police officers for mild infractions ranging from temper tantrums to “violations of codes of conduct.” Since the 1980s, suspensions, student arrests and expulsions have spiked.

It’d be nice to think that these arrest rates have little to do with race. But as Race in America blogger Antonio Ramirez writes, repeated studies have shown that though students of color don’t have higher rates of misbehavior, they receive far more draconian punishments than their white counterparts. Accordingly in Wisconsin, fully seven black students are suspended for every one white student who receives the same punishment.

It might also be nice to think that these cases don’t have any bearing on our nation’s overtaxed, inefficient criminal justice system. Too often, though, when kids are expelled — for giving a classmate Midol, for bringing scissors to class for an art project — it marks just the first departure on an ultimate path towards jail.

Photo Credit: yoppy

Te-Ping Chen is a Change.org Editor. In recent years, her writing has appeared in the Nation Magazine, the South China Morning Post magazine, Le Soir, and Slate.com.