within schools and that fact alone isn’t widely recognized. Policies vary widely from student to student, school to school, district to district and state to state. One consequence of this is that any attempt to contest a punishment is steeped in bureaucracy. Parents have to take time off work to come into schools or courtrooms to fight for their kids. Documents have to be read, understood and filed. Legal fees and fines have to be paid for records to be cleared. Obviously parents that are struggling to make enough money to provide for their families, cannot afford all this time off work in order to face up to this paperwork and processing. The consequence of this becomes very real, when suspensions are extended simply paperwork hasn’t been done. Reviewing a typical students path through the school to prison pipeline starts to illuminate where there could be opportunities for change. In Washington State alone, there are 295 school districts. This means that as a state, Washington takes 295 different approaches to discipline. The authority to pass district wide policies regarding suspension and expulsion belongs to each school board and superintendent. They adopt a set of rules and it becomes up to the principals to ensure that the teachers within their building are enforcing those rules. The gamut of discipline is wide: you can receive detention, get a phone call home, receive in-school suspension. You could be sentenced with out of school short-term or long-term suspension, or you could be expelled. Discipline doesn’t just lie within the purview of the school administration though, upon suspension or expulsion a student can be referred directly to a juvenile detention center and prosecuted, depending on the severity of their crime. This is often perceived as the crux of the problem—the relationship between school administration and the juvenile court system. This is where the metaphor of a pipeline comes in handy again. Rarely is it the case where one student, one time, breaks a rule that lands them in jail. In reality, it is a series of events, of pushes and pulls in and out of the classroom, that lead principals and teachers to recommend a student leave the school permanently and face criminal prosecution. In the past two decades, we’ve seen a tremendous increase in adult and juvenile incarceration rates and imprisonment. One source found that between 1987 and 2007, the US prison population had tripled, totaling roughly 2.3 million people behind bars. As we mentioned earlier, that led to 1 in every 100 Americans detained in a jail or prison. Don’t forget the racial disparities in that stat either: 1 in 106 whites are in custody, while 1 in only 15 African Americans and 1 in 36 Hispanic-Americans are behind bars. This “tough on crime” mentality permeated our schools throughout the 90s, meanwhile incidents like the Columbine shooting was used by administrators and politicians to justify a national crackdown in the public school system. What started out as a zero tolerance policy against guns in schools, turned into zero-tolerance of violence, weapons, gangs, drugs, truancy and tardiness. Some sources even cited zero-tolerance policies on vague infractions such as “insubordination.” The definition of a zero-tolerance policy is one that “mandates predetermined consequences for rule infractions, regardless of the circumstance.” Basically, no second chances. Theoretically, these policies are designed to create safe schools and safe classroom cultures. They also provide protection for teachers by setting up a seemingly objective protocol for how to deal with “disruptions” in the classroom. Between 1974 and 2006 the rate at which US students were suspended and expelled from school nearly doubled, from 3.7% of students in 1974 to 7.1% of students in 2006. After one school district in New York adopted a zero-tolerance policy, they documented suspensions of 4-10 year olds increasing by 76%.