Victor M. Rios: Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys
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BOOK REVIEW
Victor M. Rios: Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys New York University Press, New York, 2011, 237 pp, ISBN 978-0-8147-7638-4 Caitlin Stanfel
Received: 16 March 2013 / Accepted: 18 March 2013 / Published online: 29 March 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
In Punished, Victor Rios attempts to analyze how pervasive criminalization detrimentally affects the lives and behavior of marginalized inner-city youth. Rios firmly believes that this generation of troubled teens, from the onset of their lives, becomes trapped in a punitive system that consistently uses race, socioeconomic status and the negative views of society to subject adolescent boys to an endless amount of stigmatization. As a result of the constant policing directed toward this marginalized population, Rios argues that these boys tend to internalize their assigned criminality and attempt to defy the system by taking on the delinquent roles society expects them to uphold. According to Rios, ‘‘Criminalization left these marginalized young people very few choices, crime and violence being some of the few resources for feeling dignity and empowerment’’ (Rios 2011, p. xv). While this book was primarily designed to inform society about the types of social and structural forces adversely affecting the lives of adolescent boys in the inner-city, it also was written in the hopes of motivating policymakers and researchers to search for solutions that will help these young men integrate effectively into society and to eradicate this culture of punishment. As a skilled and curious ethnographer, Rios travelled back to his childhood neighborhood in Oakland, California, a.k.a. the ghetto, to study a diverse group of adolescent boys and their interactions with the ‘‘youth control complex’’. The youth control complex is a widespread system of criminalization shaped by the punitive policies carried out by institutions that inner-city youth come into contact with on a daily basis, such as schools, community centers, C. Stanfel (&) Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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and the criminal justice system (Rios 2011, p. 11). The main objective of these institutions is to provide a sufficient amount of control over these marginalized populations. Due to Rios’s upbringing in the ghetto and experience as a gang member, the youth in this study felt they could relate to him and were more willing to disclose their true feelings and motives behind their resistant and delinquent behavior. Rios’s first-hand account on the stigmatization of adolescent boys by an overbearing criminal justice system enabled him to write this eye-opening account. This work has the potential to shift society’s perspective of inner city Black and Latino delinquent youth and help it develop a more sympathetic perception on the way it criminalizes these adolescents. In order to initially engage the audience, Rios opens Chapter 1 with an encounter he witnessed between one of the young men he was shadowing and a police officer. W
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