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. …