Victor M. Rios

This study of the lives of Black and Latino boys in Oakland does an incredible job of portraying what is wrong in our inner cities today: a vicious cycle of punishment and social control that puts young people in a double bind and makes it nearly impossible to escape poverty and criminalization.

One of the strengths of this work is the way that Rios allows us to see his subjects as active agents in this world. They are not mere victims who are defined solely by their circumstances, but real human beings who act both in spite of and because of the harsh world imposed on them by a state that fears them.

While this ethnography would fit comfortably on many sociology and criminology syllabi, it also is quite accessible to a popular audience and deserves to be widely read during a time when the nation appears to be waking up to the injustices wrought by the state in our cities.… (más)

This book exhibits why the imperative statements "work harder and you'll succeed," and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" are utter bullshit. Victor Rios examines 40 young men in the ghetto of Oakland in this book, set-up as part case study, part analysis. These young men of Oakland are in a catch-22, damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. They live in a system where schools, media, families, gangs, peers, and society at-large are against them, what Rios calls the "youth control complex." In this system, the young men have the general choice of being a gangster to gain dignity and respect in their community (and receiving all the concurrent punishment, stigmatization, violence, abuse, and consequences) or playing good in hopes of getting out (but where they will still be falsely accused, arrested, beat, and stigmatized as well as ostracized by their family and friends). Clearly, the punitive-centric system is not working for Oakland (or the other criminalized ghettos of the world) and so Rios calls on an upending of this system towards the end of the book. We should be working on nurturing instead of criminalizing children and adolescents. Only a reform of the criminalized, punitive-centric system will yield positive results and actual opportunity for these young men.
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