Welcome to Agents of Change!
This site is intended to campaign for reducing detention and incarceration rates of children of color by assisting with dismantling the school to prison pipeline. 

The school-to-prison pipeline describes the cumulative effect of various federal, state, and local policies that are leading students away from high school completion and towards the criminal justice system.  Many of these policies center on the enforcement of punishment and creating a safe school environment, but the actual implementation of these policies have created greater education disparities under the guise of keeping schools safer.  A major philosophy that has contributed to the negative impact of these policies is zero tolerance.

Under this idea, school officials use suspension or expulsion for certain behaviors after asking few to no questions about the incident.  Zero tolerance became popular during the War on Drugs campaign, when U.S. Attorney Peter Nunez used zero tolerance as the title of a program aimed at stopping illegal drugs from entering the United States.

During the War on Drugs, the national prison population exploded and racial minorities bore the brunt of it.  Beginning in 1989, school districts in California, New York, and Kentucky picked up on zero tolerance and mandated expulsion for drugs, fighting, and gang related activity.  By 1993, zero tolerance policies that had been adopted across the country, often broadened to include not only drugs and weapons, but also school disruption.  

The school to prison pipeline is the current reflection of America’s obsession with using certain population groups as scapegoats instead of fixing the error with the educational system.