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Comment by darkarmani | Hacker News Reader

That's silly. If the 5th amendment isn't needed here then it is simply overkill. You still have the right to not incriminate oneself. They only way you are correct is if they offered a waiver of immunity for any confessed crimes. This is how they can compel you to speak in front of grand juries. For certain crimes, school officials are required to report them to the police.

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> You still have the right to not incriminate oneself.

No, you have the right not to testify information that would incriminate you in a proceeding. It's a narrower right than you're making it out to be.

You also have the right not to tell the principal of your high school about all the drugs you're doing.

So you are required to tell your school officials everything you've ever done wrong? The 5th amendment offers protection in places where you are otherwise legally required to testify, but it's obvious you don't need that additional protection in places where you aren't legally compelled to testify.

But it is a useful protection when you don't know if you are required to testify -- knowing that you have the 5th means you no longer need to know if you are being compelled or not.

> So you are required to tell your school officials everything you've ever done wrong?

That's neither here nor there. I'm just saying I doubt it's the case that the 5th amendment prevents the school administration from making a student fill out that survey in the absence of any police involvement or review of the results.

Have you been to a school recently? The "resource officer" is present in any secondary school that can afford him. This personification of the fear and incompetence of the modern American educator is the reason that fistfights, smoking, possession of prescribed medicine, etc. now regularly result in children holding criminal records. The American public high school is quite explicitly an arm of the law enforcement-industrial complex.

The likelihood that a survey in which an American public school student admitted drug use would not find its way into the grubby clutches of law enforcement is approximately nil.

5th amendment jurisprudence requires the threat of criminal proceedings to be real, not baseless speculation ("The likelihood that a survey in which an American public school student admitted drug use would not find its way into the grubby clutches of law enforcement is approximately nil.")

Stipulating your claim (are you a jurist?), how does this shake out? Do you expect the likelihood of referral to law enforcement/prosecution to be zero? If it is non-zero, how do you expect the set of self-incriminating surveys to be partitioned? Is it possible that the school administrator will consider the wealth of a student's parents, and their propensity to seek redress through the representation of an attorney? This would make these surveys more troubling, not less, because now they're putting just the poor kids into "real, not baseless" criminal proceedings.

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