Demonstrates the many devastating and interrelated threats that punitive policies like "zero tolerance" pose to youth, schooling, and democracy. Winer of the 2008 Critics' Choice Award presented by the American Educational Studies Association Expelling Hope raises critical questions about the effects of punitive policies, particularly "zero tolerance," and repressive social relationships on youth (of color) and public schooling. It argues convincingly that zero tolerance is a catchword, or linchpin, for an array of discourses and social practices that support the criminalization of youth, the militarization of public schooling and culture, and the marketization of public life. Politically impassioned and intellectually rigorous, the book provides the framework for an alternative vision of youth and schooling, one rooted in hope that calls for youth to be treated as agents of a democratic future.