When Carlos got pinched by the fuzz, he was holding some hot commodities. Flaming hot, in fact. No, that's not slang. The illegal behavior that landed Carlos (not his real name), a ninth-grade student at a high school in the southern suburbs of Chicago, in the deans' office on a mid-September morning in 2019 was the illicit sale of chips to one of his fellow students. For the crime, he was summarily sentenced to a one-day suspension from school—and his mother was called to pick him up. As Karlyn Gorski, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago,...