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English 112 Final Exam Study Questions
“The Hypercriminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth” by Victor M. Rios

Summarize the essay.

Explain what Rios means by “mass incarceration” (41).

Rios declares that his article “is to account for the social effects of mass incarceration and the criminalization of young males of color” (41). Based on the evidence he provides, what are those “social effects”?

What does Victor Rios mean when he writes “These young adult deviants do not become on their 18th birthday, rather they are systematically constructed as criminals and face the wrath of the penal state and criminalization as early as 8 years of age” (41). In what ways do you think this statement is true or false? Fully explain your answer.

Rios discloses that Black and Latino youth have been labeled “deviant” (41). From his explanations, why are they labeled this way, and how does this label affect them?

How do the problems they face in the job sector (Rios 42) account for how young Black and Latino males may view their future outcomes?

Identify the reason/reasons that the 28 non-violent offenders were treated in similar ways to Tyrone and Jose: the two violent offenders (Rios 43).

Explain what Jonathan Simon means by "crisis of ‘governance’" (43).

Explain what Rios means by his statement that “the government had become an abusive step-parent figure” (43). According to him, what are the effects of this “abusive” relationship?

What does Rios mean by "Multi-Spatial Criminalization" (44)?

Based on Jose’s account of being arrested in the third grade (45), draw a correlation between school success/failure and interactions with law enforcement.

According to Rios, What are some of the ways probation officers sometimes hurt at-risk youth (46)?

Rios states that “youth went from having little direct supervision and control for most of their lives to having a disruptive control force in their lives waiting for them to, as one of the youth put it, ‘fuck up’” (46). Explain how this approach connects to New York City’s “Stop and Frisk” laws.

According to Rios, why do some young people respond to their situations by "acting bad" (48)?

Based on Ronny’s first statement (48) and the vicious cycle explained by Rios via Bourdieou, explain and discuss the possible pros and cons of hyper-criminalization.

According to Jr.’s narrative (49), how do pressures from peers and adults affect his attempt to change his negative behavior?

What does Rios say about the “result” of “combining social services with state surveillance” (49)?

Explain the historical context Victor Rios uses in evoking W.E.B. DuBois in post-slavery (52) and connect that context with today’s hyper-criminalization of Black and Latino males.

Supplementary Exercises

Work with your study group and use the statistics in the introductory paragraphs of Victor Rios’s article “The Hyper-Criminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration” to create a visual interpretation (bar graph, pie chart, or line graph) and a written summary that tells us about the contemporary state of Black and Latino male incarceration.

Following examples from the essay, interview two-three Black or Latino male youths in your community. Based on these interviews, write a short presentation to support or disprove Rios’s observation that “[T]he youth felt that on an everyday level, their lives were being defined and controlled through discourses and practices of crimes and policies related to crime even when they were not committing crime” (43-44).