Analysis Of Punished By Victor Rios

Punished: Chapters 1, 2, & 3 Reading Reflection “Ultimately, I believe that by understanding the lives of the boys who are criminalized and pipelined through the criminal justice system, we can begin to develop empathetic solutions which support these young men in their development and to eliminate the culture of criminalization that has become and overbearing part of their everyday lives,” (Rios, 2011, page 23). This quote shows the main agenda as to why Victor Rios conducted his study on young deviant black and Latino men and how punishment and authority affected them. Through analyzing the first three chapters of Punished by Victor M. Rios, one can begin to understand how social punitive control negatively affects how these young men
Within his reasoning, he uses three major arguments: demographics, historical background, and the regulations that spawned from this area to the rest of the nation. Starting with demographics, he mentions that Oakland was ideal for his study because it is almost exactly one-third white, one-third black, and one-third Latino. He also mentions that these people are mainly poor and that segregation is obvious between those who are white and those who are not. As for the historical background of the city, Oakland has played a major role in the creation of political movements and laws. The Black Panthers originated from this area and consisted of young black men who wished to get rid of the criminalization that was thrust upon their race, gender, and age group. Unfortunately, this movement along with many others have been washed out by the Youth Control Complex in which they are inhibited by social controls such as the media, regulations, and institutions. Through the media, social movements against criminalization have been labeled as riots and have been degraded until the point of no return as one can still see in recent situations such as what happened in Baltimore earlier this year. This then causes for nothing to change and for the regulations that once criminalized them to only become worse. Regulations such as the police being able to search someone for “looking like a suspect,” the war on drugs, increased punishment for damage done by graffiti, and having a felony charge added to a different charge if they are associated with a gang caused for the social punitive of mass incarceration of young black and Latino men. Also, these regulations were not only enforced by the police, but also by institutions such as schools. Finally, due