Newsroom

The United States imprisons more people than any other country — and a staggering number are juveniles. In fact, about half a million juveniles a year enter detention centers, not including those tried as adults, according to the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit organization that supports alternatives to incarceration. Sadly, our school system is contributing to the problem. Too many children are denied their right to a quality education and instead set on a path toward failure and incarceration.

The two brothers should have been choosing the colleges they would attend, but instead they were behind bars, unsure whether they would graduate from high school at all. After getting arrested three years ago for breaking into businesses in the northwest suburbs to steal booze, the teens remained in jail for a few months as they waited their turn to attend a four-month boot camp as their sentences. At 17, they had been charged as adults with felony burglary. Had circumstances unfolded a few years later, everything might have been different.

There are synonymous meanings to the phrase “perfect storm,” but the one that describes the current state of the war on zero tolerance school policies is “a phenomenon that happens to occur in such confluence, resulting in an event of unusual magnitude.” The war started many years ago when researchers began studying the effects of school suspensions and arrests, revealing the risk of kids dropping out of school, committing crimes, and inevitably landing in prison.

During the intervening years we have witnessed a phenomenal occurrence of independent initiatives attacking zero tolerance from varying approaches. This phenomena of occurrences got a boost from an unexpected source — medical science.

Illinois has become one of only a handful of states to adopt standards requiring law enforcement to track Hispanic/Latino arrest data.