Group Punishment Is Bad Punishment

Recently, 15 Penn State football players got into a brawl, resulting in six of them being arrested. Then team's iconic coach, Joe Paterno, responded to the incident by requiring the entire team to clean up the stands at 107,000-seat Beaver Stadium the Sunday morning after each Saturday home game during the upcoming season. His rationale is that the fight was partially due to a failure of leadership on the part of every player who didn't participate in it but allowed it to happen.

Conservative columnist and law professor Walter Williams also seems to subscribe to this kind of foolishness, based on something he revealed in a recent column. Williams stated that, when a student's cell phone goes off in his classroom, he punishes not only that student (with a five percent semester point penalty), but also the student to his left and to his right with the same penalty. Williams says this is very effective in stopping cell phones from ringing in his classroom.

I must say that I'm very disappointed with both Paterno and Williams. One can argue the necessity for leadership until he turns blue in the face, but it won't change the fact that punishing an entire group or subset thereof for something that only a few, or perhaps one, of them did is inherently unfair. Yes, it gets the point across quite effectively, but that doesn't make it right. Pointing a gun at someone's head would also be a very effective means of convincing them to do something as well, but should we endorse that kind of tactic?

Not only is such punishment unfair, but it also creates a logical imbroglio for the one who imposes it. Using the Penn State situation as an example, what would Paterno have done if one of the players not involved in the fight had stood up to him and said he was not going to show up on Sunday mornings at Beaver Stadium this season? Would he have singled out that player for additional punishment or would he have imposed more punishment on the entire team for their "lack of leadership" in not convincing that dissenter to get with the program? If he chose the former, would he not have to explain away his inconsistency?