Punitive strategies such as “tough on crime” and “zero tolerance” policies that have traditionally been restricted to the field of criminal justice are currently being implemented in mainstream institutions that serve youthful populations, such as schools and civic centers. While examinations of punitive discourses and practices, poverty, and youth crime are widely documented within the current sociological, criminological, and legal literature, studies often fail to take into account the lived experiences of the youth themselves. Through life history interviews and observations, Victor Rios's book, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, provides a voice for marginalized young men in Oakland and elucidates the processes through which these young men are shrouded in a culture of punishment that shapes their life experiences and trajectories. Moreover, Rios's work is a timely contribution given the current social and political debates regarding punitive policies.
Rios's study demonstrates how criminalization, as a systemic form of punitive social control, is a dominant and omnipresent phenomenon in the lives of young males in Oakland that systematically governs and limits their life choices and trajectories. Within this community, young men of color are marginalized through constant surveillance, harassment, and discipline. Rios refers to this phenomenon as the “youth control complex” in which young people's everyday behaviors are perceived and responded to as criminal by mainstream social actors.
Rios argues that while criminalization is often portrayed as a mechanism to protect certain populations, such as increasing prison sentences to seemingly protect victims from violent criminals, its social and political utility becomes visible when examining the consequences of criminalizing young men of color. While many youth reactions to the “youth control complex” in Rios's study are perceived as negative, such as resisting mainstream institutions by establishing youth subcultures and creating hypermasculine behaviors, others are positive. For example, by resisting the system, some young men created a sense of self-respect and empowerment in their own lives that was often denied by institutional authority figures. As a result, some of the boys were capable of engaging in critical analyses of the systematic oppression they encounter within their own communities. Thus, while many acts of resistance by the boys were perceived as illogical by mainstream standards, they often played a functional role in the boys’ personal responses to the omnipresent punitive strategies they encountered in their everyday lives. In this way, Rios examines both structure and agency in examining how young Black and Latino boys in Oakland construct understandings of their social worlds.
A strength of Rios's book is his successful adaption of feminist methods to the study of men. Rios provides a social voice that is often omitted in public discourse, namely the voice of young marginalized males, to elucidate how criminalization plays out in their lives. Additionally, Rios acknowledges that his personal background and experiences, similar to the boys in his study, may have influenced his observations and interpretations of his data. Thus, consistent with feminist research, Rios recognizes his own role in the production of knowledge while concomitantly presenting an empirical study that captures the lived experiences of his participants.
Because Rios is specifically examining Black and Latino boys, race and gender are central to his analysis. The book conceptualizes the criminal justice system as a gendered institution that actively shapes young men's understandings of masculinity and illustrates how normative expectations of gender are affected by the culture of punishment. The book also presents a strong connection between the racial history of Oakland and current literature on race and the social control mechanisms of the “youth control complex” that shape the lives of the young men in his study. While this connection is present in the book, a further analysis of the racialized consequences of criminalization is underdeveloped. In terms of gender, Rios illustrates how gendered practices develop as a direct consequence of criminalization and punitive social control. He examines gendered interactions between institutional authority figures and the young men in the study, but analogous racialized distinctions are missing. Thus, Rios's work would benefit from a more comprehensive examination of the ways race was perceived and played out between the youth and various social actors.
Overall, this is a timely and significant work that would be of interest to policymakers, social practitioners, researchers, and individuals as an illustration of how punitive policies inherently disadvantage young people and why unyielding and universal mechanisms of punitive social control should be replaced with rehabilitative methods. While Rios does not situate his work within the sociolegal tradition, his work will resonate with law and society scholars as a tool for understanding the disadvantages of punitive mechanisms of social control.
