User:Jabari thompson2014
Dr. Victor Rios has a few characteristics that speak of high volume. He's an award winning college professor that teaches at UC Santa Barbara, motivational speak and also author of a few books. His target audience is middle school and high school students as well as college students. Dr. Victor Rios wants to teach the kids about the importance of higher learning, how to become a leader in your community and not be a follower and most importantly how to not be a statistic and overcome adversity.
Background Dr. Victor Rios was raised in Oakland, California, in your typical single parent household where he experienced poverty and welfare. His involvement with gangs started at the early age of 13 and by the time he was 16, he dropped out of school completely and had been to jail numerous times. After seeing his best friend murdered by a rival gang, he decided it was time to change his life. After the redirection of his life he eventually returned to school and acquired a Ph. D from the University of California at Berkley. Dr. Victor Rios uses 10 years of research and his own personal experiences in life to write his books and tell his stories. He discusses how the youth of today are given little or no choice but to use their attitudes to rebel against authority figures which sometimes leads to serious consequences such as jail. He also talks about the traps of the schooling systems that contribute to the failure of students that need help. But lastly what Rios discusses in his books that most people can relate to is his own personal experiences. He talks about how he took full advantage of the resources around him and through the support of teachers and effective programs he was able to succeed. Dr. Rios wants to make troubled youth believe they can succeed just like him.
Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys
In this book published in 2011, Rios examines the difficult lives of black and Latino men that are profiled, watched and disciplined before they commit crimes. Before writing this book, Dr. Rios followed around a group of 40 delinquent black and Latino boys between the age of 14 and 17 for a period of three years. He would run the streets with these subjects of study and also met their families and probation officers. In this book Dr. Rios talks about the harsh punishments that police dealt out to the youth forcing the teens to rebel against authority figures. He raises the argument that the zero tolerance policy that's embraced by the schools and also law enforcement that's supposed to help deter youth from crime can very well be doing the exact opposite. He discusses topics of hypercriminalization and the youth control complex.
Hypercriminalization Dr. Victor Rios defines this term as the process by which an individuals everyday behaviors and styles become ubiquitously treated as deviant, risky, threatening or criminal, across social contexts. Hypercriminalization has a serious impact on the youths perceptions, world views, and life outcomes. Hypercriminalization involves constant punishment. Punishment would be the process by which the individuals come to feel stigmatized, outcast, shamed, defeated and hopeless as a result of negative interactions and sanctions imposed by individuals who represent institutions of social control such as schools and juvenile detention centers.
Youth Control Complex Dr. Victor Rios describes the youth control complex as an interlocking system of support and punishment ensnaring America's poorest youth. He states the youth control complex creates an over reaching system of regulating the lives of marginalized young people which he also calls punitive social control.
Jail Knowledge Of the 40 boys Dr. Rios used for his study, the boys were asked to write down names of close friends and relatives that they knew in prison. All of them knew at least 6 people in jail. One guy in the group named Spider knew 32 people. When the boys were asked to rate on a scale from 1 to 5 on how likely they felt, they would be in prison in the next few months, all of them responded with at least 4. Meaning they all felt their chances of being in jail soon was fairly high. These young men looked at prison as a familiar place due to the fact that the adults they looked up to were jail inmates and they felt police and school officials treated them as prisoners anyway. These youth took a liking and idolized the prison life before they even served a day in adult prison. That excerpt from the book is just a great example of hypercriminalization and how these youth are already treated a certain way, so they will continue to act in the manner they are treated. Their way of thinking reiterates Dr. Rios argument of the institutions of social control not giving other options but to act out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0mdB43YrDQ youth control complex
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10999940600680457#.U7GGbukg-M8
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/11/10/victor-rios-on-the-youth-control-complex/
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Sociologist-Returns-to-the/128193/