In his book Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, Victor Rios examines the lives of forty black and Latino boys as he shadows them throughout their daily lives in Oakland, California. For three years, he spent his day following around a participant as they walked him through their daily routines. In many instances, they would be confronted by police, or witness some form of racial criminalization. He also grew up in this harsh environment of intense policing and unnecessary prejudices, which is why he wanted to go back and figure out how this system is affecting the futures of these youth. Rios knew what it was like to be unfairly discriminated against by police, school officials, and other authority figures. Despite his circumstances, …show more content…
It opens up with a personal story about how he and one of his participants were approached by police and ordered throw their food away, searched, handcuffed, and questioned for no reason at all. Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence throughout the book. This is one of the first times that you really understand that no matter what the teenagers are doing, they are already a target to police because of their race. Listening to these firsthand experiences from the boys opened my eyes to how much more of a victim they are than a criminal. In many situations, they feared for their own safety, so they would do whatever was necessary to avoid it; this included places like school. This shows you how real the cycle of victimization actually is. You're afraid to go to school, you eventually get kicked out of school, you're no longer getting an education, and you spend your time in more negative and potentially dangerous situations. The author did a great job of combining critical criminology and urban ethnography in this study to understand how power, society, and culture worked together to determine the outcomes of these people's lives. By recruiting a mixture of different ethnicities, family lives, criminal backgrounds, and social experiences, he was able to both compare them and include an idea of how the population treated them as a whole. I feel like it was helpful for him to be both an outsider and an insider in this situation. Yes, he was from that area and would be treated harshly at times, but he was also a graduate student who was conducting a social experiment with a better situation than these young people. It was also beneficial to them to have a positive influence in their life showing them that they can go from a life of crime and break the cycle of victimization. Seeing a positive example of someone