Disparity By Victor M. Rios: Chapter Summary

This book talks about how African American and Latino young men in Oakland, California are most likely to targeted by police. The author Victor M. Rios, who once was a gang member and juvenile delinquent, but turned his life around. Explains how youth of color in his hometown are harassed, profiled, watched, and disciplined at young ages by authorities. Even though they have not committed any crimes. It took him three-year study to calculate is data and present it. For this observation, Rios used 40 African American and Latino young men in Oakland. As Rios pointed out that colored youth are not involved in crime or delinquency but unfortunately for them their kind has been labeled as criminals throughout history, and it still

The author’s personal background, his familiarity with the scholarly literature on critical criminology and ethnography, and his three-year study of the 40 young men in Oakland combine to produce a significant contribution to the understanding of how our society oppresses and criminalizes young men of color. Rios’s affirmation of the humanity and aspirations of these young men is quite strong, as is his unrelenting exposé of the social processes which systematically deny their humanity and aspirations. While the grave problems of mass incarceration and police brutality have been widely discussed in numerous books and journals, the other aspects of the “youth control complex” have received less attention, and this book helps to address this gap in the literature. The author’s analysis of the role of probation officers, school officials, and even family members in the “youth control complex” is particularly informative. His discussion of the psychological and social damage inflicted on these young men by “hypercriminalization” is both revealing and

The author acknowledges that capitalist globalization and neoliberalism have created the deplorable economic conditions in which many Oakland residents live. He alludes to the need to change the “social order” of impoverished communities and the “social contexts” in which individuals make vital choices about their lives. However, he eschews any call for systematic social change and instead hopes that policymakers will change policies and redistribute resources from criminal justice programs to “nurturing institutions.” Such hopes are undoubtedly well-intentioned, but they pale in comparison with the social problems the author has so capably illuminated. In the end, Rios avoids any acknowledgment that the end of anti-working class and racist repression, the progressive transformation of social institutions, and the massive redistribution of material resources will require the abolition of capitalism and the development of a new socialist