We all recognize the need for effective law enforcement, but we should also understand our own rights and responsibilities — especially in our interactions with the police.

The School to Prison Pipeline (STPP) is a nationwide system of local, state, and federal education and public safety policies that pushes students out of school and into the criminal justice system. The system disproportionately targets youth of color and youth with disabilities. Inequities in areas such as school discipline, policing practices, high-stakes testing, wealth and healthcare distribution, school “grading” systems, and the prison-industrial complex all contribute to the Pipeline.

The over-policing of New York City schools, paired with school zero tolerance policies, drives youth directly towards the juvenile and criminal justice systems. While the city over-invests in expensive policing measures for schools that are disproportionately low income, black and Latino, these schools remain under-resourced in fundamental areas that harm student learning. Students in these schools also are more likely to be subjected to zero tolerance policies that involve police personnel in minor, non-criminal incidents and rely too heavily on suspensions.

To order a free copy of the Youth Camera Action DVD and the School to Prison Pipeline Toolkit, call 212-607-3388 or send an email to youthcameraaction@nyclu.org.

This New York Civil Liberties Union report finds stark racial disparities between the general population and the population of persons designated as Level 3 sex offenders. The report also charges that New York uses flawed procedures for assessing an offender's risk of re-offending.

Sparked by cases where women were denied access to reproductive health care while incarcerated, the NYCLU launched an investigation of policies for provision of health care specific to female inmates in county jails. We found that although women incarcerated in New York State are legally entitled to reproductive health care, few county jails have policies ensuring comprehensive access to such care.

The NYPD arrested and jailed nearly 400,000 people for possessing small amounts of marijuana between 1997 and 2007, a tenfold increase in marijuana arrests over the previous decade and a figure marked by startling racial and gender disparities, according to a report released Tuesday at the New York Civil Liberties Union. The report, The Marijuana Arrest Crusade in New York City: Racial Bias in Police Policy 1997-2007, is the first ever in-depth study of misdemeanor marijuana arrests in New York City during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations.

There has emerged over the last decade a broad consensus among policy experts, criminal justice scholars and lawmakers that the War on Drugs, with its singular emphasis on incarceration, has failed. In 1993, on the 20th anniversary of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, New York State Corrections Commissioner Thomas Coughlin, III, said the state was "lock[ing] up the wrong people ... for the wrong reasons."

Since the NYPD took control of school safety in 1998, the number of police personnel in schools and the extent of their activity have skyrocketed. At the start of the 2005-2006 school year, the city employed a total of 4,625 School Safety Agents (SSAs) and at least 200 armed police officers assigned exclusively to schools. This report, Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Public Schools, offers the following recommendations for reforming New York City’s school policing program – all of which can be accomplished without any sacrifice to school safety:

Independent oversight of the New York Police Department is essential to making police accountable in instances of misconduct. Ignored complaints of police misconduct erode the public’s trust in the police force and weaken its ability to protect the public. The City of New York amended its Charter in July 1993 to establish the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent oversight agency to review and investigate civilian complaints of police misconduct.