Punished

Rios, Victor

Published by NYU Press

Rios, Victor.
Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys.
NYU Press, 2011.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/11092.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/11092

[ Access provided at 31 Jul 2020 04:13 GMT from Indiana University Libraries ]
 1

Dreams Deferred

The Patterns of Punishment in Oakland

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin

in the sun? . . . Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it
explode?
—Langston Hughes, “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” 1951

Just as children were tracked into futures as doctors, scientists,

engineers, word processors, and fast-food workers, there were
also tracks for some children, predominantly African Ameri-
can and male, that led to prison.
—Ann Arnett Ferguson, Bad Boys, 2000

Fifteen-year-old Slick, a Latino kid born and raised in Oakland, showed

me the “hotspots”: street intersections and sidewalks where life-altering
experiences linger, shaping young people’s perspectives of the area. As
he walked me through the neighborhood, he pointed to the corner of
International Boulevard and 22nd Avenue, where a few months before
his best friend took a bullet in the lung during a drive-by shooting. He
watched his homey die slowly, gasping like a waterless fish, gushes of
blood inundating his respiratory system. We approached the corner of
23rd Avenue and International, and Slick warned me that “at any given

[ 3 ]
 Dreams Deferred

moment something could jump off, fools could roll up, and shit could go
down.” He did not have to tell me; I had been on these streets in the past
as a resident and as a delinquent and later on in life as an ethnographer,
observing the young people who spent so much of their lives on these
streets. We stopped at a mobile “taco truck” to order a burrito. Stand-
ing on the corner watching cars and people pass by, Slick continued to
“break it down” for me: “Just the other day, mothafuckas rolled up on
me and pulled out a strap to my head. . . . Fuck it, today is my day, . . . so
I threw up my [gang] sign and said, ‘Fuck you.’ . . . The thang [gun] got
stuck or some shit, ’cause I saw him pulling but nothing came out.” Slick
seemed to pretend to show no trauma as he told me the story, but his
lips quivered and his hands shook ever so slightly as he grabbed his soda
from the taco vendor.
As we took our first bite and wiped our hands on our baggy jeans,
an Oakland Police Department patrol car pulled into the taco-truck lot.
Two officers emerged from the car and ordered us to sit on the curb:
“Hands on your ass!” Slick looked down at his burrito, and I realized
we were being asked to throw our meal away after only taking one bite.
The officer yelled again. Our fresh burritos splattered on the chewing-
gum-dotted concrete, and we sat on the curb with our hands under our
thighs. An officer grabbed Slick’s arms and handcuffed him. Another
officer did the same to me. One of them lifted us up by the metal links
holding the cuffs together, placing excruciating pressure on our shoul-
der joints.
As they searched us, I asked the officers, “What’s going on?” They
provided no response. They took out a camera and took pictures of Slick
and me. “Who is this guy?” they asked Slick, pointing to me. Slick told
them, “He’s from UC Berkeley. He’s cool, man!” The officers unlocked
our handcuffs, told Slick to stay out of trouble, and got in their cars and
drove off. The officers had noticed me in the neighborhood and had
asked many of the boys about me. They knew I was some kind of college
student trying to help the boys out. One of them later told me that I was
doing the boys no good by studying them and advocating for them. The
officer told me that I was enabling them by harboring their criminality
and that I should be arrested for conspiracy.

[ 4 ]
 Dreams Deferred

I looked around and saw that a crowd of pedestrians and taco-truck

patrons had gathered a few feet away from us. I made eye contact with
a Mexican man in his fifties wearing a cowboy hat. He nodded his head
with a disappointed look and said, “Pinches cholos” [fucking gangsters]
and walked away. I turned to Slick and said, “You OK?” He replied, “That
happens all the time. They got nothin’ on me.” “How often does it hap-
pen?” I asked. “Shit! Come on, Vic! You know wassup. It happens every
day,” Slick replied.

This kind of interaction with the police was common in my observations

and in the accounts of Slick and the other boys I studied. All forty of
the boys whom I studied in depth, and most of the other seventy-eight
youths whom I informally interviewed and observed, reported negative
interactions with police. Only eleven of the one hundred and eighteen
youth reported any positive experiences with police. The majority of
interactions between police and youth that I observed over the course of
three years were negative.
A paradox of control took precedent: based on informal conversations
with officers, I found that many of them seemed to sympathize with the
poverty and trauma that many young people experienced; however, in an
attempt to uphold the law and maintain order, officers often took extreme
punitive measures with youths perceived as deviant or criminal. How-
ever, police officers were not the only adults in the community involved
in criminalizing young men like Slick. As school personnel, community
workers, and family members attempted to find solutions to rule break-
ing, defiance, crime, and violence, they seemed to rely on criminal jus-
tice discourses and metaphors to deal with these young “risks.” In this
social order where young people placed at risk were treated as potential
criminals, social relations, worldviews, and creative responses were often
influenced by this process of criminalization. In order to understand the
process by which young people came to understand their environment
as punitive and to observe, firsthand, how criminalization operated in
their lives, I shadowed a group of young men for three years. This chapter
describes this process and begins to show the way that ubiquitous crimi-
nalization operated in some of their lives.

[ 5 ]
 Dreams Deferred

Ubiquitous Criminalization
Leaving the corner where the police had stopped us, Slick and I con-
tinued to walk through his neighborhood. As we walked away from the
avenue and through an alley to Slick’s house, he told me he started evad-
ing school at age fourteen in fear for his own life, threatened by the same
boys who killed his friend. Slick told me that teachers treated him differ-
ently after his friend’s death, as if he were responsible for the shooting.
When he arrived late to class a few weeks after the murder, his teacher
picked up the phone and called the police officer stationed at the school.
She told the police that Slick was a threat to her and to other students.
The officer took Slick to his office and told him that he was on the verge
of dying, just like his friend. Slick was sent to the vice principal. “The vice
principal told me, ‘I have to kick you out because you have missed too
many school days,’” Slick explained.

I found that schools pushed out boys who had been victimized. Six of
the boys in this study reported being victims of violence. All six of them
returned to school after being victimized, and all six described a similar
process. The boys believed that the school saw them as plotting to com-
mit violence as a means to avenge their victimization. As such, the school
commonly accused the boys of truancy for the days that they missed
recovering from violent attacks and used this as justification to expel
them from school. Four of the boys were expelled from school under tru-
ancy rules shortly after their attacks. After being expelled from school,
feeling a sense of “no place to go,” Slick spent most school hours hanging
out with friends in front of the same intersection where his homeboy was
gunned down, risking further victimization.

On our way to Slick’s house, we took a break, sitting on his neighbor’s

squeaky wooden steps. As we began to talk, the resident opened the door
and told us to leave “or else.”
“Or else what?” asked Slick.
“Or else I will call the police!”
Slick cussed out the neighbor, murmuring out his frustration. The
neighbor slammed his front door. Nervous about another encounter

[ 6 ]
 Dreams Deferred

with police, we walked away. Defeated by the degrading events of the day,
we continued walking toward his house, our heads bowed and mouths
shut, both of us silenced. Slick and I sat on his steps until 7 p.m., when
his mother arrived. She greeted me. She knew me as the “estudiante” [stu-
dent] who was trying to help her child.1
I talked with Slick’s mother, Juliana, for about an hour. She told me
her frustrations with Slick. I listened attentively and told her that I would
try to convince him to join Youth Leadership Project, a local grassroots
youth activist organization that helped young people involved in gangs
transform their lives by becoming community organizers.
I drove home, to 35th Avenue, in the same neighborhood, where I
had taken residence to be closer to my research participants. I wrote
some field notes and opened up Policing the Crisis, a book about how
the media and politicians create scapegoats to deal with economic cri-
ses by sensationalizing crimes committed by black people.2 I read about
moral panics, those events or people—for example, black muggers,
AIDS, pregnant teens, gang members—deemed a threat to mainstream
society. According to the book, moral panics are often constructed as a
result of economic and cultural crises. Often, it is the media and politi-
cians who become central players in determining who or what becomes
the moral panic of the time. They generate support for an increase in
spending on crime or a decrease in spending on welfare for the “unde-
serving” poor.3
I asked myself whether Slick and his homies had become the moral
panics in this community, and if it was this attention on their perceived
criminal behavior which had led to the intense policing and surveillance
that I observed and that the youth spoke about more broadly.4 This is
where my research questions for this project became clear: How do sur-
veillance, punishment, and criminal justice practices affect the lives of
marginalized boys? What patterns of punishment do young people such
as Slick encounter in their neighborhoods in Oakland? What effects do
these patterns of punishment have on the lives of the young men in this
study? Specifically, how do punitive encounters with police, probation
officers, teachers and administrators, and other authority figures shape
the meanings that young people create about themselves and about their
obstacles, opportunities, and future aspirations?

[ 7 ]
 Dreams Deferred

Shadowing Marginalized Youth

To answer my questions about criminalization, I observed and inter-
viewed young males who lived in communities heavily affected by crimi-
nal justice policies and practices. Delinquent inner-city youths, those at
the front line of the war on crime and mass incarceration, were the best
source of data for this study. Their experiences spoke directly to the impact
of punitive policies and practices prevalent in welfare and criminal justice
institutions. I got to know forty Black and Latino boys who were between
the ages of fourteen and seventeen when I began the study. I interviewed
them, conducted focus groups with them, met with their friends and their
families, advocated for them at school and in court, and hung out with
them at parks, street corners, and community centers during the course
of three years, from 2002 to 2005. Thirty of these young men had been
arrested and were on probation. Ten of them had not been arrested but
were related to or closely associated with boys who had been arrested.
I shadowed these young men as they conducted their everyday routine
activities, such as walking the streets, “hanging out,” and participating in
community programs. I walked the streets and rode the bus with them from
home to school and as they met with friends or went to the community
center after school. There were days when I met them in front of their door-
steps at 8 a.m. and followed them throughout the day until they returned
home late at night. I met their parents, probation officers, and friends. I
attended court with their parents when the boys were arrested. Shadowing
allowed me access to these young people’s routine activities, exposing me
to major patterns prevalent in their lives, including criminalization.
Shadowing enabled me to observe regular punitive encounters and the
way these became manifest in the lives of these youth in a range of differ-
ent social contexts, across institutional settings. Interviews with the boys
supplemented my observations and allowed me to hear their perspectives
on these patterns of punishment. By getting to hear these young people’s
definitions of criminalization, I was able to conceptualize aspects of their
lived experiences that would be difficult to see otherwise. I decided to
make young people’s perspectives central to my understanding of crime,
punishment, and justice in their community. Sociologist Dorothy Smith
explains that “we may not rewrite the other’s world or impose upon it a

[ 8 ]
 Dreams Deferred

conceptual framework that extracts from it what fits with ours. . . . Their
reality . . . is the place from which inquiry begins.”5 I took this goal to
heart in conducting this study. The voices of these young men supple-
ment the scholarship, much of it theoretical, that attempts to explain the
expansion and social consequences of the punitive state.6 These observa-
tions and voices would help me to test these theories on the ground and,
if needed, to develop new ways to understand the consequences of the
punitive state on marginalized populations.
Although a study of authority figures and social-control agents—
school personnel, police, politicians, and other adults who hold a stake
in overseeing the well-being of young people—could have provided a
broader array of perspectives on punishment, I decided to focus on the
voices of the youth. This is partly because I found that the perspectives
of social-control agents were commonly represented in the media and
institutional discourses and practices. For example, in the news media,
when youth crime becomes an issue, police are often the “experts” who
are interviewed to discuss their perspectives on why young people com-
mit crime. However, the perspectives and experiences of the youths expe-
riencing this violence, criminalization, and punishment are rarely taken
into account in public discourse.
Readers may consider the accounts of the youth in this study to be
one-sided. I urge readers to eradicate a dichotomous, either/or, perspec-
tive and instead focus on how young people come to understand their
social world as a place that sees them and treats them as criminal risks.
Even if adults make individual attempts to treat young people with empa-
thy and respect, some youngsters have come to believe that their environ-
ment is systematically punitive. How do young people come to believe
that “the system” is against them? I could provide interviews with police
officers that discuss their desires to help these young men. However, the
point of this project is to show the consequences of social control on the
lives of young people regardless of good or bad intentions. A sociologi-
cal cliché clarifies my point: “If men [and women] define situations as
real, they are real in their consequences.”7 If young people believe that
the social ecology in which they grow up is punitive and debilitating,
then they will experience the world as such. If institutions of social con-
trol believe that all young people follow the “code of the street”8 or that

[ 9 ]
 Dreams Deferred

defiant or delinquent poor, urban youth of color are “superpredators”—

heartless, senseless criminals with no morals—then policies, programs,
and interactions with marginalized youths will be based on this false
information.9
In order to create a study that would uncover the process of criminal-
ization that young people experienced, I combined the methods of criti-
cal criminology with urban ethnography to develop an understanding
of the punitive state through the lens of marginalized populations. Both
methods offered me tools essential to understanding and documenting
the lives of the young men I studied. Critical criminology, the study of
crime in relation to power, which explicitly examines crime as a socially
constructed phenomenon, allowed me to bring to light the mechanisms
responsible for the plight of marginalized male youths in the new mil-
lennium. Urban ethnography, the systematic and meticulous method of
examining culture unfolding in everyday life, allowed me to decipher the
difficult and complex circumstances, social relations, and fabric of social
life under which these young men lived.

Recruitment
I began recruiting participants at a youth leadership organization and a
community center—which I refer to with the pseudonyms “Youth Lead-
ership Project” (YLP) and “East Side Youth Center” (ESYC)—in Oak-
land, California. YLP was located in Oakland’s Fruitvale District, where
Latinos made up 49 percent and Blacks made up 20 percent of the pop-
ulation. ESYC was located in the Central East Oakland District, where
Blacks made up 50 percent and Latinos made up 38 percent of the pop-
ulation. I told the community workers about the study and asked them
to connect me with “at-promise” (“at-risk”) young men, ages fourteen to
seventeen, who had previously been arrested.10 I was introduced to four
Latino boys through community workers at YLP and three Black boys
through community workers at ESYC. While both organizations focused
on consciousness raising and politicizing young people as a means for
transformation, I recruited young people who had spent less than one
month working with these organizations. This way, I would gain insight
from young men who had yet to be influenced by this approach.

[ 10 ]
 Dreams Deferred

After meeting with these young men, I asked them to refer me to other
youths in similar situations, as well as to young men who they knew had
not been arrested but who hung out with guys who had, a technique
known as snowball sampling.11 With snowball sampling, I was able to
uncover a population of young men who were surrounded by or involved
in crime and who had consistent interaction with police. Only the eight
initial boys had contact with the youth organizations I initially contacted.
The other thirty-two boys were not involved in any community programs
at first contact. Although many of the boys ended up knowing each other
and formed part of a social network, my goal was to understand how boys
in these networks of crime, criminalization, and punishment made sense
of these processes and to observe their interactions with authority figures.
The young men in this study were not representative of Black and Latino
youths throughout the United States, in the inner city, in Oakland, or the
criminal justice system. These were unique cases of young men from
unique communities who reported and were seen to live in an environment
where criminalization was an everyday part of their daily lives.12 While
many marginalized young people face the wrath of punitive social control
and criminalization, it was difficult to generate an in-depth study that found
a representative sample of young people in such a predicament. The alter-
native strategy was to utilize unique cases, young people who had already
been marked by the system and who believed that they were being system-
atically criminalized. I ended up with a particular group of young people,
those who were implicated in the regime of punishment in the inner city.
It is obvious that the majority of young people living in poverty are
not delinquent. I specifically sought delinquent young people and their
peers. This approach would help me to locate the mechanisms of con-
trol put in place to regulate this population, already formally labeled as
deviant. Observing these young people might teach us more about the
culture of punishment and criminalization prevalent in marginalized
communities in the era of mass incarceration. After getting to know the
boys and having them connect me with their friends, I began to inter-
view them and gain enough trust to observe them. Field observations
were carried out in three Oakland neighborhoods and eventually also in
San Francisco and Berkeley, places where some of the young men in this
study eventually moved. I also conducted observations at one continu-

[ 11 ]
 Dreams Deferred

ation school—a school for students who had been expelled from “regu-
lar” high school—where eight of the boys in this study were eventually
enrolled. Whereas traditionally urban ethnographers study a specific site
as their case study, such as a neighborhood or a street corner,13 I studied a
group of young people, each of them representing a case.14 This approach
was crucial in order to keep track of the trajectories that developed for
each of the young men in this study.
During the time I was in the field, the communities that these young
men came from were becoming gentrified. Since the late 1990s, high rent
increases and urban-development policies had forced many working-
class families in the San Francisco Bay Area to constantly move between
neighborhoods and cities in search of affordable housing. Many of the
young men in my study consistently moved around because of this situ-
ation. This meant that I had to shadow participants wherever they ended
up: sometimes to a neighboring city or neighborhood (and sometimes
to juvenile facilities by way of their parents). Some of them I followed to
their new neighborhoods. By the end of the study, I had lost track of eight
of the forty youths I studied in-depth. Therefore, I ended up with thirty-
two young men whom I studied in-depth for the entire three years.

Observing Masculinity
This study focuses on the experiences and stories of young men. Young
women’s experiences with punishment are unique and therefore may
require a different methodological approach and conceptualization
to understand their predicament. Researchers have shown that young
women experience domestic abuse, criminal justice abuse, sexual abuse,
and violence in qualitatively different ways than boys do.15 Recent scholar-
ship is finding that poor young women are heavily impacted by a “violent
girl” trend in which young women who are considered violent are being
incarcerated in record numbers.16 I recognize the importance of gender in
the experiences of youth, but analyzing the experiences of young women
is beyond the scope of this current work.17 I offer an in-depth analysis that
deals with the ways that masculinity affects the lives of these boys and the
way it spills over to impact the lives of young women—from expectations
of violence to the enactment of sexism and misogyny. By interrogating

[ 12 ]
 Dreams Deferred

the ways that gender, in this case masculinity, impacts the worlds of these
youths, I hope to provide a more nuanced understanding of how gender
norms are particularly affected by punishment.18

O.G. Sociology
When this study began, I was twenty-five years old. I had grown up in the
flatlands of Oakland and had lived in two of the neighborhoods where
these young men came from. These factors, along with the snowball
sampling approach, in which the young men’s friends vouched for me—
often by saying, “He’s cool; he’s not with the five-o [police]”—allowed
for most of the young men in the study to comfortably gain trust and
develop a sense of camaraderie with me. Many of the boys acknowledged
me as someone they could trust and look up to. The majority referred to
me as “O.G. Vic.” “O.G.” stands for “original gangster.” This label is often
ascribed to older members of the neighborhood who have proven them-
selves and gained respect on the street and, as a result, are respected by
younger residents. I told the young men not to consider me an O.G. since
I believed, and still do, that I did not deserve the label. My belief was
that any researcher who considered himself an O.G. was being deceptive.
Although I grew up in most of the neighborhoods where I conducted this
study, the reality was that at the time of the study I was a graduate student
with many privileges that many of these young people did not have. I was
an “outsider” as much as an “insider.” This was important to recognize in
a study that examined the lives of marginalized subjects. Throughout the
study, I remained reflexive about my insider/outsider role and the power
relations that emerged and solidified as I studied these young men.
At the same time, if the youths looked at me with the kind of respect
that they gave to O.G.s, some who often led them in the wrong direc-
tion, I would guide them toward positive alternatives as much as I could.
I often saw myself conducting “O.G. Sociology,” similar to John Irwin’s
“Convict Criminology,” where someone who had previously been incar-
cerated—in my case, someone who had also “put in work” (belonged to a
street gang)—became an analyst of this very same experience.19
I wanted to avoid swaggering about my experiences gaining entrée,
hanging out, witnessing violence, or “going rogue,” as sociologist Sudhir

[ 13 ]
 Dreams Deferred

Venkatesh called it in his 2008 book, in which he claimed to have been

allowed to “be a gang leader for a day” by a notorious Black gang in Chi-
cago. Narratives such as Venkatesh’s create what I call a “jungle-book
trope.” This very familiar colonial fairy-tale narrative in the Western imag-
ination of the “Other” goes something like this: “I got lost in the wild, the
wild people took me in and helped me, made me their king, and I lived
to tell civilization about it!” Unfortunately, some of my colleagues who
study the urban poor continue to perpetuate this self-aggrandizing narra-
tive, perpetuating flawed policies and programs and a public understand-
ing of the urban poor as creatures in need of pity and external salvation.
This book is not for those expecting to read about bravado, blood,
and irrational violence—dominant allusions when discussing inner-city
youths. In this study, I decided to normalize “dangerous settings” and
discuss what happens on a routine basis—people living life, striving
for dignity—and not what happens during extreme moments: people
victimizing one another, often in response to marginalization. I discuss
these extreme cases only when they apply to the production of knowl-
edge and not when I think they will have some emotional appeal to the
reader or when I feel like “going rogue.” Sociologist Nikki Jones describes
the process by which some ethnographers portray a false reality of mar-
ginalized populations: “In an attempt to explain the inner workings of
one group of people to another, many contemporary ethnographic texts
begin from a point of ignorance instead of from a point of understanding
and commonality. . . . In an attempt to enlighten those with the power
to effect change [these ethnographies] have the effect of making oth-
ers under study more unintelligible than they ever really were.”20 Like
Jones, I conducted this study with the assumption that the young people
I studied were normal everyday people persisting in risky environments,
striving for dignity, and organizing their social worlds despite a dearth of
resources.
Sociology and feminism scholars Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill
Collins have argued that all knowledge is rooted in experience and that
those who have lived on the margins may provide crucial insights to spe-
cific social problems.21 I believe that my standpoint epistemology, the
knowledge I have gained from my personal experiences, brings much
insight to this conversation. However, it is my obligation as a social sci-

[ 14 ]
 Dreams Deferred

entist to provide a road map for those who have not had my experience
to be able to replicate a similar study and find the same patterns and pro-
cesses I encountered. Although I brought my own social situation to this
study, that was not enough to give me the insights I needed to develop an
understanding of the conditions that marginalized young men from Oak-
land were facing. From my experience and from my reading of theories
of crime, delinquency, race, and punishment, I had my own ideas about
youth and punishment in Oakland. I wanted to go beyond my own expe-
rience. I wanted to create an empirical study that would uncover the pro-
cess by which criminalization impacted the lives of young people.
One of my graduate-school professors warned me, “Go native, but
make sure to come back.” When I returned from the field, I told him, “I
took your advice and went native in the academy, but I made sure to go
back to the community where I come from.” All quips aside, I acknowl-
edge that my insider status limited my observations. As a researcher,
participants’ responses and my own assumptions may have resulted in
“bias [of] the description to please the ethnographer.”22 In addition, my
own assumptions and negative experiences with police may have shaped
my view of observed events. However, I proceeded with caution and
acknowledged that I was a participant in the creation of the stories that
follow.23 I became part of the study and part of the forces that both cre-
ated and resisted the very power relations I sought to expose. The fact
that I also encountered harassment by police and other community
members for looking like the boys allowed me to embody a keen sense
of what these young people were experiencing.24 After all, as Erving Goff-
man put it, fieldwork requires “subjecting yourself, your own body and
your own personality . . . to the set of contingencies that play upon a set
of individuals, so that you can physically and ecologically penetrate their
circle of response to their social situation, . . . so that you are close to
them while you are responding to what life does to them.”25
I was able to conduct an in-depth study on youth who saw me as an
adult they could trust. With trust comes obligation—the obligation to
give back by actively engaging in the lives of the youths I studied.26 It
became my obligation to address their questions in a world full of faulty
answers. By the time I met them, many of their pathways were already
set. They had already experienced a young life of adjudication and crim-

[ 15 ]
 Dreams Deferred

inalization. Therefore, even if I represented the possibility of change in

their lives, I could not negate the forces of criminalization and patterns
of punishment already established. Helping a young person attain a job is
a risk worth taking, even if we believe that this will change our findings.
I think that it is naive to believe that one’s subtle interventions in mar-
ginalized settings will change our findings. While I have power, privilege,
and resources, my individual actions are not godly in any way to change
structural conditions, entrenched processes that grind away, impacting
the lives of abandoned populations on a day-to-day level.
My biases were very much part of this study. Howard Becker explains
that “an observer unwittingly imposes normative judgments on what
is observed.”27 These judgments are based on the observer’s own poli-
tics and epistemologies. However, helping people and generating solid
empirical research are not mutually exclusive in my view. Therefore, to
ensure validity, I only bring out themes and cases that typify recurring
patterns in my observations and interviews, and I also conduct a system-
atic search for disconfirming evidence.28 In other words, every story that
I tell in this book represents a reality that many other youths in the study
experienced as well.

Youth Demographics
Of the forty youths I studied in-depth, thirty had previously been
arrested when I met them. An additional ten had never been arrested but
lived in a neighborhood with high violent-crime rates and had siblings or
friends who had been previously involved with crime (see table 1.1). Most
of the offenses committed by the delinquent youths were nonviolent;
only three had been arrested for a violent act. All the youths in this study
reported, at first contact, having persistent contact with police officers
while growing up. Twenty-two had spent at least a week in juvenile facili-
ties, and thirty were assigned a probation officer at the time that I met
them. Nineteen of the youth I studied in-depth reported gang involve-
ment. Out of seventy-eight others that I interviewed, met with in focus
groups, and observed, fifty-two reported gang involvement. The neigh-
borhoods in which these youths had grown up had at least four major
Black gangs and four major Latino gangs.

[ 16 ]
 Dreams Deferred

Ta b l e 1 . 1
Criminal Justice Status at First Contact of Forty Youths Studied In-Depth
Previously arrested 30
Friend or relative of previously arrested youths 10
Reported negative interactions with police at first interview 40
One week or more spent in juvenile facility 22
Assigned a probation officer 30
Parent in jail or prison 14
Gang involved (confirmed through self-reports or observations) 19

Ta b l e 1 . 2
Class Status at First Contact of Forty Youths Studied In-Depth
Working Class: Working Poor: Extreme Poverty:
Two parent, Single parent, Unemployed single-
low-wage incomes low-wage income parent household
Reported Reported Reported
$16,000–$34,000 $8,000–$16,000 $0–$8,000
yearly household yearly household yearly household
income income income.
12 16 12

Twenty-eight of the young men I studied in-depth came from single-

parent households. Twelve of the boys were what I would define as work-
ing class: they had at least one parent who worked full-time in a viable and
stable job, were able to afford a basic standard of living, and occasionally
enjoyed some luxuries such as a family vacation or a new car. Sixteen boys
were from working-poor families that had at least one working parent but
were barely able to make ends meet, especially in an extremely expensive
housing market, in which some families spent over 70 percent of their
income on rent. Twelve boys came from extreme poverty, where they lived
in an unemployed single-parent household, often in unhealthy living con-
ditions, such as living with nine other people in a one-bedroom apartment
or living in an apartment known to be used for drug use or drug sales.
Twenty of the boys were Black, and twenty were Latino. Because East
Oakland was 40 percent Latino and 50 percent African American at the

[ 17 ]
 Dreams Deferred

time that I began this study, I decided to focus on the experiences and
perspectives of these two dominant groups. Although other cities or
communities may host a majority African American population that
experiences the brunt of punishment, Oakland, as I will demonstrate,
criminalized Blacks and Latinos in similar ways. Boys from both of these
racialized groups reported and were observed to encounter punishment
almost identically, albeit to varying degrees. Oakland was one of the first
traditionally Black cities in the United States to see an influx of Latino
immigrants, which eventually transformed it into a Black/Latino city.
Many other traditionally Black cities across the country continue to see
an increase in the Latino population. What I found in Oakland was that
the punitive patterns of punishment designed to historically control
Black youths were also being applied to young Latinos. By understanding
this process and the overall patterns of punishment in Oakland, we may
be able to understand patterns of punishment among Blacks and Latinos
in other multiracial urban settings.
In my observations, I found that Black youth encountered some of
the worst criminalization in Oakland. One example is that light-skinned
Latinos gained respect from teachers and police once they chose to dress
more formally. Black youths, however, still faced criminalization, even
when they dressed more formally.29 Research on the impact of the crimi-
nal justice system and race continues to show that Blacks face the direst
consequences and that Latinos are sandwiched in between Blacks and
Whites. Latinos have a higher chance of being arrested, incarcerated, and
convicted than Whites do for similar offenses, but they do not face the
same severity as do Blacks. In Oakland, I found that both groups were
criminalized in similar ways but that Black youths faced harsher sanctions
than did Latino youths. I also found that both groups formed a common
subculture which resisted punishment. I found that Black and Latino
youths understood punitive social control as a collective racialization-
criminalization process in which they saw themselves caught in the same
web of punishment.

[ 18 ]
 Dreams Deferred

Consequences
Although parents, police officers, and school officials may have had good
intentions, they were consistently understood by youths in this study as
adversarial and excessive in their punishment.30 Experiences with pun-
ishment led young people to develop a specific set of beliefs, thoughts,
actions, and practices in order to survive the cruel treatment they
encountered and to strive for their dignity.31 But delinquent kids, those
who had been arrested for breaking the law, were not the only young
people who were criminalized. Young men who were not delinquent but
lived in poor neighborhoods also encountered patterns of punishment.
They were also, for example, pulled over by police officers, questioned by
teachers and administrators, and looked at with suspicion by merchants
and community members. Kids who were considered good, those who
had not broken the law and did relatively well in school, experienced part
of this stigma and punishment as well.32 In order to avoid this punish-
ment, they had to constantly prove that they were not guilty, that they
were not criminals. These boys frequently felt that they were treated as
guilty until they could prove themselves innocent, and much of their
worldviews and actions were influenced by this process. Many of their
social relations were structured by their attempts to prove their inno-
cence, what I refer to as “acting lawful.”
Although I focused my attention on a small number of young men in
one American city, I believe, as many other scholars do, that this crimi-
nalization is occurring in other marginalized communities throughout
the United States and in multiple institutional and community set-
tings.33 This study, while grounded in Oakland, California, may provide
a deeper understanding of the punishment that other youth experi-
ence in other marginalized communities. For example, the Jena Six,
who entered the national spotlight in 2007, encountered patterns of
punishment and criminalization that are similar to those analyzed in
this book. In the fall of 2006, two Black high school students in Jena,
Louisiana, sat under the so-called White Tree at their high school. The
White Tree was named by White students who specifically sought to
exclude Black students from this space. The Black students asked their
principal for permission to sit under the tree, despite its perceived sta-

[ 19 ]
 Dreams Deferred

tus as belonging to White students. When the principal responded,

“Sit wherever you want,”34 and the Black students did, White stu-
dents reacted by hanging nooses from the tree. When Black students
protested the light punishment (a three-day suspension) given to the
students who hung the nooses, District Attorney Reed Walters came
to the school and told the Black students he could “take [their] lives
away with a stroke of [his] pen.”35 Walters’s statement proves true for
many of the youths in this study; their life chances are impacted by the
discretions of multiple authority figures in the community. A district
attorney’s intervention to solve a school conflict is indicative of the
trend to use crime-control metaphors and material resources to solve
non-criminal, everyday social problems. This was the trend in Oakland,
and it seems that hypercriminalization has become a primary form of
social control in several marginalized communities.
In Jena, in December 2007, a fight broke out between Black stu-
dents and a White student who threatened them and called them “nig-
gers.” The White student sustained minor injuries from the fight. The
Black students involved were arrested and charged with aggravated
battery and second-degree attempted murder.36 Mychal Bell, the first
defendant to go to trial, was convicted as an adult, despite being six-
teen years old when the event occurred. He faced up to twenty-two
years in prison. The case produced protests around the nation against
Bell’s conviction and called national attention to the racism inform-
ing the punishment of these young Black men. As a result, Dr. Phil,
Oprah, Nightline, and other major media outlets provided detailed
coverage of the case. Most coverage emphasized the victimization of
the White student who had been beaten by the Jena Six and the “racial
demons” that haunted Jena. Few outlets, however, provided equal time
to the extreme punitive treatment that the Jena Six students received.
Jena showed how race matters in crime and how young Black people
become criminalized. Media, political, and community explanations
for these kinds of personal troubles often blame Black criminality, racial
tensions, or White supremacy for events of this kind. However, it is
time to find a systematic explanation for the public issues of punitive
social control that affect poor marginalized youths in local settings,
throughout the globe.37

[ 20 ]
 Dreams Deferred

Book Overview
What follows is a snapshot of the complicated world of some boys grow-
ing up in Oakland, California, in the midst of a system of punishment
which, from their perspective, maintains an ironclad grip on their every-
day lives. I attempt to understand the processes by which marginalized
boys become enmeshed in punishment. Ultimately, I argue that a sys-
tem of punitive social control held a grip on the minds and trajectories of
the boys in this study. What this study demonstrates is that the poor, at
least in this community, have not been abandoned by the state. Instead,
the state has become deeply embedded in their everyday lives, through
the auspices of punitive social control. Fieldwork allowed me to observe
firsthand the processes by which the state asserts itself into civil society
through various institutions, with the specific intent of regulating devi-
ant behavior and maintaining social order. This punitive social control
becomes visible when we examine its consequences. These include oppo-
sitional culture, perilous masculinity, and other actions that attempt to
compensate for punitive treatment. But not all consequences of punitive
social control are detrimental. The mass and ubiquitous criminalization of
marginalized young people, what I refer to as hypercriminalization, brings
about a paradox. One response to criminalization is resistance. Some of
this resistance is self-defeating. However, other components of this resis-
tance have the potential to radically alter the worldviews and trajectories
of the very marginalized young people that encounter criminalization.
Part 1 examines this system of punitive social control that has devel-
oped in Oakland, California. In chapter 2, Oakland is analyzed as a case
study in which young Black and Latino males have had a history of crimi-
nalization and punitive social control. Chapter 3 introduces the reader
to two young men who typify the recurring patterns I encountered with
most of the young men in this study. I delve into the life stories of these
boys, whose experiences provide the reader with an understanding of
the deeply embedded day-to-day criminalization that marks them from a
young age.38 I discuss their perceptions of growing up in an environment
that renders them as criminals and the defiance that they develop to cope
with and resist the unresolved shame and stigma imposed on them by
punishment.

[ 21 ]
 Dreams Deferred

In chapter 4, I analyze the everyday cultural and institutional aspects

of criminalization and provide a conceptual framework for understand-
ing this system of punishment, which I call the youth control complex. Spe-
cifically, I examine the family, schools, police, and probation. I show how
interactions with these different institutions of social control have a com-
bined effect on youth which forces them to understand their social world
as one where various institutions and individuals systematically criminal-
ize them, generating ubiquitous punitive social control.
In part 2, I examine the consequences of this punitive treatment. I
show how criminalization and punitive social control shapes young
people’s decision-making, actions, worldviews, and identities. Chapter 5
examines the significance that defiance and resistance have for inner-city
boys. What types of resistance do they deploy? I argue that what some
scholars have understood as “oppositional culture” and “self-defeating
resistance” is often a form of resilience that, if channeled in the right way,
is capable of transforming the lives of boys such as those in this study.
Chapter 6 examines how the criminal justice system is a gendered
institution that heavily contributes to young men’s understanding of
manhood. I examine how these boys enter manhood in relation to pat-
terns of punishment. Whether they comply with the system or resist it,
these young men form specific types of masculinity that often lead them
to enact symbolic and physical violence against young women.
Chapter 7 examines the lives of non-delinquent boys. I argue that the
non-delinquent boys who lived in marginalized neighborhoods inhabited
a double bind: they had to overcompensate to show authority figures that
they were not criminal by rejecting their peers and family members who
had been labeled as such. This rejection often led these “lawful” youths
to be labeled as “sell-outs” or “snitches” by their peers, while at the same
time authority figures continued to see them as suspects despite their
extraneous efforts. This also rendered “lawful” young men as vulnerable
to victimization for not being “man enough.” Police told them to “man
up” and provide information about their “criminal” friends and rela-
tives, while the streets told them to “man up” and “don’t snitch.” I discuss
how the “don’t snitch campaign” became influential among these boys
because of criminalization. In other words, “snitching” developed a new
definition. “Snitching,” for the young men in this study, meant collaborat-

[ 22 ]
 Dreams Deferred

ing with the youth control complex; it meant supporting the system in
its endeavor to criminalize marginalized young people. “Don’t snitch,” for
many of the boys, meant, “don’t become part of the system that is crimi-
nalizing our community.”
Finally, my conclusion discusses the types of alternative forms of social
control that the young men who transformed their lives encountered. I
show how resilience among the boys in this study was developed in rela-
tion to the social control they encountered. In other words, the more
rehabilitative, reintegrative, and positive their interactions with authority
figures, the more the boys believed in themselves and understood them-
selves to have a better future.
My ambition in this book is to show the failures of criminalization,
the failures of using harsh, stigmatizing, and humiliating forms of pun-
ishment to “correct” and “manage” marginalized youths, as well as to
highlight the consequences that these methods have on young people’s
trajectories. Ultimately, I believe that by understanding the lives of boys
who are criminalized and pipelined through the criminal justice system,
we can begin to develop empathic solutions which support these young
men in their development and to eliminate the culture of criminalization
that has become an overbearing part of their everyday lives.

[ 23 ]