Review Of Policing The Lives Of Black And Latino Boys By Victor Rios

Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, a book by University of California, Professor Victor Rios, is set in the backdrop of Oakland, California. This book examines the very difficult lives of young Latino and African American boys who are caught up in the vicious cycle of delinquency in a legal system that restricts their chances of becoming successful. Rios studies the lives of boys growing up in a difficult background. He notes that the criminal justice system is very prevalent throughout many aspects of their daily activities.

Rios’s book examines the punitive social control in Oakland and his study focuses on young Black and Latino males who have a history of criminalization and interactions with various forms of social

He shadows them at school and in their neighborhoods watching their day-to-day activities. He notes that police and crime also follow them in their daily activities. The primary goal of his study is to understand how boys in these complex webs of crime, criminalization, and punishment made sense of these processes and to observe their interactions with an authority official. Throughout the book, Rios notes that these boys go through many aspects of criminalization such as the labeling hype. Labeling is a process by which agencies of social control further stigmatize and mark the boys in response to their original label. This gives law officials an even bigger and better opportunity to further belittle these young men and push them further down the road to a criminal existence. By criminalizing all of the boys, the police, it seemed could not tell the difference between criminals and innocent young people try to live their

A recent study of sentencing decisions in Pennsylvania (Steffensmeier et al., 1998) identified significant interrelationships among race, gender, age, and sentence severity. The authors of this study found that each of the three offender characteristics had significant direct effects on sentence outcomes and that the characteristics interacted to produce substantially harsher sentences for one category of offenders—young black males. This study responds to Steffensmeier et al.'s (1998:789) call for “further research analyzing how race effects may be mediated by other factors.” We replicate their research approach, examining the intersections of the effects of race, gender, and age on sentence outcomes. We extend their analysis in three ways: We examine sentence outcomes in three large urban jurisdictions; we include Hispanics as well as blacks and test for interactions between ethnicity, age, and gender; and we test for interactions between race/ethnicity, gender, and employment status. Our results are generally—although not entirely—consistent with the results of the Pennsylvania study. Although none of the offender characteristics affects the length of the prison sentence, each has a significant direct effect on the likelihood of incarceration in at least one of the jurisdictions. More importantly, the four offender characteristics interact to produce harsher sentences