Do detentions work?

Why detentions matter more for the watching crowd than the guilty

As you walk on by
Will you call my name?

Simple Minds, Don’t You Forget About Me

When I was a student I was given a lot of detentions. After some particularly appalling behaviour on a French exchange trip I was given two months of 1 hour after school detentions. This was a big deal as I lived about 15 miles away from my school and needed to get two buses home. Because I wasn’t able to catch the school bus, I had to walk to the nearest train station, wait for the hourly shuttle to a larger town and then get my bus to within walking distance of my home. What began as a 1 hour detention usually ended up taking over 3 hours. You’d think this would serve as an effective deterrent, but, being a very immature teenager with poor impulse control and an inability to think through consequences, it wasn’t.

Or at least, not for me. But if we’re going to consider whether detentions work, we need to think about who they work for. In most circumstances, most students behave well. For every 10 children, let’s imagine one always does the right thing, whatever the provocation and one will always try to push the boundaries. The other 8 will go with the flow: if they see one child getting away with poor behaviour they’ll behave less well but if they see that misbehavure is rare and dealt with consistently, they’ll fall into line.

So, here’s the thing: detentions only work for those kids who go with the flow. It would be obviously wrong to punish children who always behave well and kids who, like me, always seem to do the wrong thing are unlikely to be persuaded by consequences they routinely fail to see coming. But for the majority who can be influenced, detention, as part of a whole school system, can be very effective.

One of the effects of my 2 month period of detention was that a lot of the kids who were prone to go along with my silliness were very keen to avoid joining me after school. It could be argued that even though detention didn’t make much difference to my behaviour, it made a lot of difference to theirs. Not only did detention at my school have a huge impact on the length of my day, they were also designed to be unpleasant. I was given jobs like scrubbing out the PE showers with a toothbrush and, if I was spotted loafing, I’d be sent on a lap of the playing fields.

Things have changed for the better. These days the worst that’s likely to happen to an errant student is that they’ll be asked to sit in silence and get on with missed school work. Whether or not this changes their behaviour, it at least sends the signal that school work is important. More commonly, teachers use a detention as an opportunity to have some sort of restorative conversation, to try to get to the bottom of why the students has done wrong and to put in place a plan to prevent further misdemeanours. This is probably always worth trying, but, I think rightly, no one wasted time talking to me about what I’d done wrong. I never had a clue why I chose to misbehave and the best I could have done was to confabulate a post hoc rationalisation.

The idea that detentions are either some sort of panacea or a complete waste of time is to fail to understand social and cultural norms. What we see becomes normal. What we accept is acceptable and what is permitted is promoted.

Detentions are a deterrent for some students but not for all. Although they won’t solve the problems of the most persistent offenders, they signal to those members of the student body who are able to weigh up risk and reward that there are sanctions in place, and that poor behaviour will be met with predictable, proportional and fair consequences.

The key, as with all aspects of behaviour management, is certainty not severity of consequences.