Youth Crime and Stigmatization - Book Report/Review Example

ethnographic research helps him to collect some data, which he bases on to argue that 40 Latino and Black teenage boys featured in his study are subjected to a group of social control, which he refers to as the “youth control complex.” In his conclusion in the book, “Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys” he looks at the idea to account for the varied realisms in which the teenagers become criminalized. He suggests that the institutions responsible for doing this are the school, the family, the police, inconvenience stores, and the parole officers (Rios 60).

Further, he explores how community institutions and criminal justice organizations have developed into punitively “coupled” by illustrating how the youth control complex can criminalize Latino and Black youths using daily and maybe well-intentioned punishment acts. However, the boys enact agency in an unavoidably disciplinary context through practices like hypermasculinity, “going dump,” political resistance, and cultural straddling. Even though the author stresses on the youth control complex to act as a self-reinforcing entrap that channel the youth to the ultimate destination of prison, he matches this bleak with tangible solutions.

Rios tries to illustrate how culture of control works. His study of the 40 Oakland teenagers of color shows how this group found the way in the terrain of poverty in a crime-governed city (Venkatesh 45). The author, who himself was part of the Oakland group scene prior to pursuing his Doctorate in the UC Berkley, has some an unparalleled insights on how the rationale of crime control pervade the institutions in Oakland city, on a daily basis. From this, he shapes the aspirations and the identities of youths of color.

In addressing the “youth support complex” issue, he shows the most powerful insights by taking a reader through how routine verbal as well as physical harassment by the police on the teenagers of color make the youths live that