Florida lockup statistics

New facts are emerging about Florida's official state sport of locking schoolchildren in psychiatric wards for no defensible reason.

About 3½ out of every 1,000 young people in Florida were involuntarily committed by their schools in 2007 (the most recent year for which numbers are available). That doesn't sound like a huge number. But that's no comfort if you happen to be one of those locked up.

To put it in starker terms, there were 3,365 school-initiated involuntary commitments in the Sunshine State that year. These occurred without the parents' consent, and afflicted children as young as 4.

That comes out to about 65 incidents per school day. (I'm assuming the school year is 180 days, but with corporatism ruling the roost in America's schools, you never know.)

What could possibly lead to that many students being locked up? If your school is the same size as the public middle school I attended, odds are you'd have 2 schoolmates being dragged away. Clearly, these students aren't committing deadly acts.

It's because they won't conform to some capricious standard. It's kind of like the problems I had with my high school. I think it's pretty clear that you don't have to be suffering from a major psychiatric disorder to be committed with no court hearing. All it takes is a school's say-so.

Florida children have been committed because they got in minor playground squabbles or skipped a class. That's it.

What's even more astounding is the lack of parental consent.

One state (Nebraska) is so insistent on claiming the age of majority is 19 that it now requires 18-year-old university students who live on campus to call their parents just to be treated by the campus physician. But Florida takes 4-year-old schoolchildren to locked psych wards without parental permission?

That used to be called kidnapping.

I guarantee you that if I was a parent of one of these 3,365 kids, I'd be ripping the doors off the psych ward to get them out. Not unlike the storming of the Bastille.