While a variety of factors and decisions facilitated the emergence of the school to prison pipeline, zero-tolerance policies—and other similarly aggressive behavioral policies—are directly responsible for the pipeline’s growth, and for the pipeline’s disproportionate impact on students of color. In their article, Bullying and Zero-Tolerance Policies: The School to Prison Pipeline, Berlowitz, Frye, and Jette demonstrate how zero tolerance policies affect student of color more severely than white students ¹⁶. In his piece, Turning off the School-to-Prison Pipeline, Harry Wilson argues that removing zero-tolerance policies is critical to stopping the pipeline. Zero tolerance policies escalate misunderstandings or minor incidents into incidents involving the police, often simply because a teacher subjectively felt their safety was in jeopardy. Wilson contends this feeling of compromised safety is related to cultural misunderstandings rather than actual danger. Both articles argue that zero-tolerance policies fuel the school-to-prison pipeline and that this pipeline disproportionately harms minorities compared to whites.

Berlowitz et. al argue that “racist disparities in the implementation of zero-tolerance policies including suspensions and expulsions contribute to a ‘push-out’ mechanism”¹⁷ that affects non-white, lower-class students more often than it does white, middle-class students. This disparity of treatment is mirrored by our nation’s patterns of incarceration: African-Americans are locked up at six times the rate of whites. ¹⁸ The “push-out” theory contends that students who are pushed out of school—via suspension, expulsion, or because they are pushed by suspensions to drop out—and left to “run wild in their neighborhoods” are “typically not up to anything good.” ¹⁹  These students eventually get into trouble and begin a contentious relationship with a justice system that is difficult to avoid after a first offense—thus placing them on a pipeline directly from school to prison. ²⁰ Wilson supports this argument by citing a study entitled: Breaking Schools’ Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Student’s Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement (Council of State Governments Justice Center, 2011). The study found that students with one suspension were five times more likely to drop out, and that students were suspended as a disciplinary action were almost three times more likely to be involved in a juvenile justice matter in the following year.²¹ Additionally, BZT presents a study that found “alternative punishments tended to be ‘worked out’ for white, middle-class students…On the other hand, minority students that were considered behaviorally problematic were eliminated from the student population by use of strict adherence to zero tolerance policies.” ²² Thus, Berlowitz et. al contend that schools—and teachers—are complicit in a system of institutionalized racism based on fear.²³  This is corroborated by the Breaking Schools’ study which found that ninety-seven percent of incidents that resulted in exclusion (either suspension or expulsion) did not utilize state mandated suspension or expulsion laws—rather they were at the discretion of educators and “children of color were significantly more likely to be removed.” ²⁴ Thus, we see a system that utilizes police and the justice system to resolve “incidents once handled by a trip to the principal’s office” more likely when the incident involves a student of color or lower economic status, thus placing that student in the school to prison pipeline. Together the two articles paint a clear picture of how zero-tolerance policies push students, especially low-income students and minority students, on the school-to-prison pipeline.

The two articles also recommend strategies that can be used to combat the school-to-prison pipeline. Wilson argues that the elimination of zero tolerance policies is the critical objective for eliminating the pipeline.²⁵ Changes in teacher and administrator training that aim to enable teachers and administrators to build positive school climates is a second important step.²⁶ Increased community involvement is important because a strong community can not only be a support system for students and the school²⁷ but can also provide opportunities for students who are suspended. Lastly, Wilson urges giving youth a stronger advocacy voice—a voice that will strengthen the case against zero-tolerance policies and thus closer to eliminating the pipeline.

Berlowitz et. al contend that the most effective way to end the school-to-prison-pipeline is by developing alternatives to zero-tolerance policies, increased interplay between medical, psychiatric, counseling, and social work services, resisting the privatization of public schools and high stakes testing, and breaking down the barriers which prevent minority teachers from being able to teach in schools.²⁸

In conclusion, both articles demonstrate the existence of system of institutionalized racism that utilizes zero-tolerance policies to remove “problematic” students—often minority or low income—from schools rather than help them move forward in life as schools are supposed to do.