Victor M. Rios: Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys

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, 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. While sitting on a street curb, Rios and the young man were abruptly handcuffed and searched by a passing police officer, without ever being informed as to what had prompted this harassment. This punitive interaction between law enforcement and inner-city youth summarizes what Rios stresses throughout the whole book: institutions provide a constant amount of monitoring and policing on these marginalized populations, in an attempt to control the young men’s lives and maintain social order. Rios recounts several narratives, similar to the one above, which allow the readers to obtain a more accurate perspective **on the hardships these youth endure on a daily basis. Rios states, ‘‘The majority of interactions between police and youth I observed over the course of 3 years were negative’’ (Rios 2011, p. 5). In the rest of the chapter, Rios describes the marginalized youth he shadowed, how he came to recruit this population, and his ultimate goal of the empirical study. A delinquent group of 40 adolescent Black and Latino boys living in C. Stanfel (&) Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: cstanfel@indiana.edu