In an interview with Rethinking Schools, Alexander says that school discipline policies were directly copied from the get-tough rhetoric of the war on drugs. One of the earliest examples of “zero tolerance language in school discipline manuals was a cut-and-paste job from a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration manual.” Alexander says schools quickly “began viewing children as criminals or suspects, rather than as young people with an enormous amount of potential struggling in their own ways and their own difficult context to make it and hopefully thrive.”