“CHICAGO — A recent poll seems to imply that the general public does not understand, and maybe has never heard of, the school-to-prison pipeline.
It is a national trend in which children — more often than not, minorities — are caught up by “zero-tolerance” public school policies that criminalize minor infractions of school rules.
In the past, such violations might have been handled by the principal. But the increase of law enforcement staff in schools has led to outsized punishments that set children at risk for further run-ins with the law and, ultimately, landing in the juvenile and criminal justice systems”