the piece about race and privilege: 1 in 106 whites are in custody, while 1 in 15 African Americans and 1 in 36 Hispanic Americans are behind bars. Despite this, there is tons of research that shows that whites commit crimes at the same rate as people of color. Who actually ends up serving time prison is due in large part to over-policing of areas where people of color predominantly live, and harsher prosecution and sentencing in our court systems. The United States has a long history of discrimination against people of color— sometimes that discrimination is physically written into laws, like segregation in the Jim Crow era. Sometimes that discrimination plays out far more subtly, like who was targeted for subprime mortgages in foreclosure scandals, or who can gain access to banks and credit card accounts. Our history books show that there was once a time when our society believed people of color were biologically less intelligent than white people—an idea known as eugenics that has long been discredited. However, many of the vestiges of eugenics still haunt us. Far too often politicians and people in power blame social inequities on the characteristics and personality traits of individual communities or ethnic groups. This notion is scientifically unfounded and needs to be squashed. This is the reason it is so important to create distinction between the words achievement and opportunity: it is not a matter of individuals achieving less. It is a matter of how our social systems deny opportunities to underrepresented populations. Dismal learning environments and overuse of juvenile detention services are two examples of where we can begin the discussion! While discrimination and race-based biases are a known and common thread in our nation’s history, the enormous rate of imprisonment is not. In fact, only three white-houses ago, in the Clinton era, the United States embarked on all sorts of “tough on crime” politics. Outside of schools, these politics led to a major escalation in law enforcement, what is known to many as the Drug War. In the context of schools, tough on crime meant the creation of “zero tolerance” policies for drugs, alcohol, and weapons on school campuses. The outcomes are over policed public school campuses, and tighter links between our schools and juvenile justice systems. When I first read the Crime and Community report, the wheels in my brain automatically started turning and connecting these two institutions: the public school system and the prison system. In particular, I kept remembering a horrifying story that circulates around the education world: that some states have estimated the number of prison cells they will need to build in the future based on their public schools’ reading or test scores—from as early on as the third grade. And then I started remembering the news story where two judges in Pennsylvania plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for accepting over 2.6 billion dollars in kickbacks from private youth detention centers. These judges sentenced over 5,000 young offenders to private juvenile justice centers in exchange for the cash. Four thousand of these rulings have been overturned since those two judges were removed from their jobs. So with a lot of concern but less knowledge, we set out to explore the opportunity gap, and how it relates to the school-to-prison pipeline. The very first piece of information we found was disheartening, but also gave our project greater importance in our eyes: Washington is one of 9 states in this country whose opportunity gap is still growing. Students of color within our state’s public school system also have disproportionately higher rates of suspension, expulsion, truancy and drop-outs. Not only does this lead to a disproportionate number of students of color falling behind in school, but BIG disparities in the demographics of kids sent off to Juvi as well.