The St. Louis Public Schools 2011–2012 Student Code of Conduct Handbook outlines a strict discipline policy: For weapons, drugs, assault, threats on staff, and repeated infractions, the first offense comes with an automatic 10-day out-of-school suspension; the second offense includes long-term suspension or expulsion. Indecent exposure, insubordination, disrespect, fighting, vandalism, and coercion come with automatic suspension for the first offense.

Zero-tolerance policies were implemented throughout Missouri public schools — and most of the rest of America — beginning in the 1990s under Bill Clinton and extended, later, under George W. Bush. According to the ACLU, zero-tolerance meant that out-of-school suspensions rose by 600 percent between 2004 and 2009. Only 17 percent of those were for violent acts.

Frankie had been kicked out of 22 different public schools in the St. Louis area, usually for class disruption and “talking back” to teachers and authority figures. The schools he attended ranged from Lexington Elementary School to Normandy High — the high school that Michael Brown graduated from two months before he was killed.

When Frankie was 13, school authorities at his middle school called the police in to deal with him for disrupting class. Two police officers ended up physically restraining him: They hogtied his legs and tied his hands behind his back, duct-taped his mouth, and pepper sprayed him.

(Dave Tulis/AP)

His experience resembles what many call the school-to-prison pipeline, a theory that argues that bringing policing and criminalization into schools streamlines the incarceration of young people and pushes them into the prison system.

And sure enough, when Frankie was 21, he was arrested and charged with a felony — holding enough marijuana to get him with intent to distribute. Missouri has some of the harshest drug laws and sentencing in the country, and marijuana sentences range from a year in jail for the smallest possession to life imprisonment. It also mirrors the country in being heavily disproportionate by race: In St. Louis, for every one white person arrested for marijuana, about 19 black people are arrested. Despite the fact that marijuana usage is pretty much equally split between black and white.

If convicted, Frankie faced more than a decade in prison. His bond was set at $20,000 cash, but Frankie’s family didn’t have the money. Before going to trial, he spent 19 months in a St. Louis city jail called Medium Security Institution (MSI), otherwise known as The Workhouse.

Frankie recalls experiencing “torture and pain” regularly at MSI from solitary confinement, guard abuse, and unsanitary conditions. He says guards would repeatedly force inmates, including himself, to fight each other and place bets on them, or would bribe prisoners with cigarettes, snacks, and outside food to get them to fight each other while they watched.

The roaches he remembers particularly. “When you wake up in the middle of the night and flick that light on you see the whole cafeteria, it’s bugs and roaches, mice.” The overcrowding in the jail exacerbated the unsanitary conditions.

One day when Frankie was being held in solitary, he says he was physically abused by one of the guards in the unit. Frankie was let out of his cell l to go see the nurse for a checkup. As he returned, with his legs and arms shackled, the guard approached Frankie and told him he was walking too slow. Frankie responded, “This is how I walk.” Then, as Frankie tells it:

“He slammed me to the wall. Picked me up off my feet and started choking me. Choking me and I passed out and next thing you know I got slammed to the ground. And right there he still had his grip around me and I couldn’t scream or nothing because that’s how tight he had the grip around me. You have a lieutenant that came running in and another C.O. There’s a nurse there…They see my eyes roll back and I wasn’t responding so they took him off me… Trying to kill me, that’s what it felt like. He jumped off …but he ran back and grabbed my leg and twisted my ankle. This is a guard. And [then] I go in my cell without no medical attention.”