down on small offenses in order to make residents feel safer and discourage more serious crime. For schools, this meant more suspensions for small offenses like talking back to teachers, skipping class, or being disobedient or disruptive. This led to schools having police officers in schools, which in turn lead to students being arrested and handled more harshly. Zero-tolerance policies are regulations that mandate specific consequences in response to outlined student misbehavior, typically without any consideration for the unique circumstances surrounding a given incident. Zero-tolerance policies both implicitly and explicitly usher the student into the prison track. Implicitly, when a student is extracted from the classroom, the more likely that student is to drop out of school as a result of being in class less. As a dropout, that child is then ill-prepared to obtain a job and become a fruitful citizen. Explicitly, schools sometimes do not funnel their pupils to the prison systems inadvertently; rather, they send them directly. Once in juvenile court, even sympathetic judges are not likely to evaluate whether the school's punishment was warranted or fair. For these reasons, it is argued that zero-tolerance policies lead to an exponential increase in the juvenile prison populations. The national suspension rate doubled from 3.7% to 7.4% from 1973 to 2010. The claim that Zero Tolerance Policies affect students of color at a disproportionate rate is supported in the Code of Maryland Regulations study, that found black students were suspended at more than double the rate of white students. This data is further backed by Moriah Balingit, who states that when compared to white students, black students are suspended and expelled at greater rates according to the Civil Rights Data Collection, that has records with specific information for the 2015–2016 school year of about 96,000 schools. In addition, further data shows that although black students only accounted for 15% of the student population, they represented a 31% of the arrests. Hispanic children share this in common with their black counterparts, as they too are more susceptible to harsher discipline like suspension and expulsion. This trend can be seen throughout numerous studies of this type of material and particularly in the south. Furthermore, between 1985 and 1989, there was an increase in referrals of minority youth to juvenile court, petitioned cases, adjudicated delinquency cases, and delinquency cases placed outside the home. During this time period, the number of African American