Write a book review on “Punished” by Rios

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Write a 3 page double spaced Times New Roman 12pt font book review. I attached the chapters below. Also, MLA style too please. Thank you!
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NYU PressChapter Title: Dreams Deferred: The Patterns of Punishment in Oakland Book Title: Punished Book Subtitle: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys Book Author(s): Victor M. Rios Published by: NYU Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16f99dh.5JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/termsNYU Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PunishedThis content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Part IHypercriminalizationThis content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
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[3]1Dreams DeferredThe Patterns of Punishment in OaklandWhat 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,” 1951Just 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, 2000Fifteen-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 This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[4]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.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[5]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.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[6]Ubiquitous CriminalizationLeaving 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 This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[7]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.1I 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.3I 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?This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[8]Shadowing Marginalized YouthTo 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 This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[9]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 This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[10]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.9In 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.RecruitmentI 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.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[11]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-This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[12]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 MasculinityThis 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 This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[13]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.18O.G. SociologyWhen 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.19I wanted to avoid swaggering about my experiences gaining entrée, hanging out, witnessing violence, or “going rogue,” as sociologist Sudhir This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[14]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-This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[15]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.”25I 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-This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[16]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 DemographicsOf 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.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[17]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 Table 1.1Criminal Justice Status at First Contact of Forty Youths Studied In-DepthPreviously arrested30Friend or relative of previously arrested youths10Reported negative interactions with police at first interview40One week or more spent in juvenile facility22Assigned a probation officer30Parent in jail or prison14Gang involved (confirmed through self-reports or observations)19Table 1.2Class Status at First Contact of Forty Youths Studied In-DepthWorking Class:Working Poor:Extreme Poverty:Two parent, low-wage incomesSingle parent, low-wage incomeUnemployed single-parent householdReported $16,000–$34,000yearly household incomeReported $8,000–$16,000yearly household incomeReported $0–$8,000yearly household income.121612This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[18]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.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[19]ConsequencesAlthough 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-This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[20]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.37This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[21]Book OverviewWhat 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.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[22]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-This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dreams Deferred[23]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.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:22 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
NYU PressChapter Title: The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex Book Title: Punished Book Subtitle: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys Book Author(s): Victor M. Rios Published by: NYU Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16f99dh.6JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/termsNYU Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PunishedThis content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
[24]2The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control ComplexThe popular demonization and “dangerousation” of the young now justifies responses to youth that were unthinkable 20 years ago, including criminalization and imprisonment . . . and zero tolerance policies that model schools after prisons.—Henry Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, 2009It’s like they put a bomb on my back, but I was the one that pulled the trigger.—eighteen-year-old Flaco, 2003The FlatlandsOn any given sunny afternoon, one can find a concentration of hun-dreds of young people hanging out along an eighty-four-block span of International Boulevard, the main thoroughfare in Oakland, that streams through the four-mile heart of the poor and working-class districts of the city. This part of Oakland is known by some people as the “flatlands” and is associated by many with crime, violence, and drugs. A 2009 Discovery Channel documentary, Gang Wars: Oakland, claims that there are “ten thousand gang members here who rule with lethal force” and labels the neighborhoods that I studied as the “killing zone.” In 2008, this part of Oakland made national headlines when a transit officer at a BART (sub-This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [25]way) station was videotaped shooting and killing a young Black man named Oscar Grant. Grant was shot in the back while he was handcuffed and lying on the ground. Some in the community firmly believed that the killing of Oscar Grant was not an isolated incident. Many activists pro-tested and claimed that the killing of Oscar Grant was a consequence of unchecked police harassment and brutality.A few months later, Oakland again appeared on the national news: this time, a young Black man, by the name of Lovelle Mixon, shot and killed four police officers before police gunned him down, killing him as well. A few of the young men in this study, though they had never before par-ticipated in any form of social protest, took part in demonstrations that protested the killing of these two young Black men. Local and national news-media outlets reported these protests as “riots,” delegitimizing their appeals for social justice and reinforcing images of wild, criminal youth.1Young people from Oakland, in the media and public imagination, seem to be synonymous with violence, poverty, drugs, gangs, and hopeless-ness. By 2010 an official from California’s governor’s office had declared Oakland to have a “dire” gang problem.2But far from criminal “superpredators,” most youths in Oakland are liv-ing productive, normal, everyday lives, surviving and persisting in a city that hosts the fourth-largest violent crime rate in the country. Some gather on street corners looking for excitement. They simply hang out on Interna-tional Boulevard to pass the time, live, shop, court, work, or socialize. But some of them are active in the informal economy and are on the street to prostitute, sell drugs, or pirate stolen merchandise.3 Traveling down this street, at the intersection of 14th Avenue and International Boulevard, we begin to find hallmarks representative of much of the flatlands: liquor stores, small businesses, mothers walking with small children, ethnic res-taurants, and dilapidated buildings boarded up with plywood. In 2000, the U.S. Census conducted a “case study” in this part of Oakland and found that 33 percent of the population residing “near East 14th Street” (the for-mer name for International Boulevard) lived below poverty.4From 14th Avenue until about 19th Avenue, we find a large number of Southeast Asian businesses and residents. Some of the residents of this neighborhood are Cambodians who arrived in the United States as refu-gees of the Khmer Rogue and have since developed a strong ethnic enclave This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [26]in the midst of a large Black and Latino/a presence. In this small com-munity, young Asian men have formed gangs to protect themselves from larger Black and Latino gangs and to produce street-based alternatives to their parents’ struggles to make ends meet.5 One of the youths in the larger sample of this study, Sunny, grew up in this neighborhood. His story shows how Southeast Asian boys have also become criminalized when they don’t fall into the expectations constructed by model-minority stereotypes.From approximately 20th Avenue to 54th Avenue, the boulevard fea-tures mostly Mexican businesses and residents. This part of the flatlands is the most densely populated area in Oakland, and the level of heavy traffic up and down the boulevard reflects this. Buses pass by, constantly loaded with a multicultural array of passengers traveling to and from school and work. Paleteros, vendors pushing small shopping-cart-sized ice-cream containers on wheels, ring their bells to attract attention and, hopefully, a customer. “Scrapers,” late-1980s and early-1990s Oldsmobile and Buick sedans with twenty-two-inch wheels and flashy paint jobs, make up part of the heavy traffic. Trucks and large SUVs, with even larger twenty-four- or twenty-six-inch chrome wheels, also cruise the boulevard. Most of the vehicles that we see are old and dented and appear ready to break down, perhaps explaining why a heavy concentration of mechanics, auto-body garages, and car-audio shops are littered across this section of the flatlands.Latino/a and Black youth sit at bus stops, stand on corners, walk to and fro, and eat at the many taco trucks, mobile Mexican restaurants, which line the street. In this part of Oakland, the city has placed surveil-lance cameras on street corners. Police officers drive around on noisy Harley Davidson motorcycles and in patrol cars. The motorcycle officers often hide behind buildings, looking for drivers who appear “suspicious.” The victims of these stops are typically nonwhite youths, who “match descriptions of criminal suspects,” or undocumented immigrants, and their vehicles are confiscated until they can show up at the police station with a driver’s license (which they cannot attain without papers proving citizenship or legal residency). The patrol-car officers stop and search young people, looking for drugs, weapons, or evidence of “gang activity.”A critical mass of Black residents begins to emerge after 55th Avenue and grows the further we travel into East Oakland through 98th Avenue. Black youths bustle through the boulevard in these parts. Some are walk-This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [27]ing to and from Heavenscourt Middle School, the only middle school located on International. Others make their way to Food King, a dilapi-dated nonfranchise supermarket which has been in business in this com-munity for over twenty-five years; it is the only American-foods super-market on International. Barbershops, a furniture store, a funeral home, beauty salons, and barbecue restaurants are some of the Black-owned businesses we find along this stretch. Black churches, some in large build-ings which take up half the block and others in small storefronts, are scat-tered around. Liquor stores become larger and more numerous in this area. Recently remodeled, colorful public housing complexes face the boulevard. A large group of Black youths live in these complexes. We will later return to shadow Tyrell, who lived in this area.An increase in the Latino/a population over the past twenty-five years is signaled by a handful of Mexican food stores and restaurants in the area. Police patrol cars drive around sporadically; young people are often stopped and searched here, as well. In 2009, I witnessed a Highway Patrol officer dragging a teenage Black girl out of a 1970s Chevrolet Caprice in front of Heavenscourt Middle School, over one mile away from the near-est highway. Even though she was in handcuffs and passive, the officer pulled her with enough force to make her scream in pain. As she fell to the ground, the officer continued to drag her as her arms and face scraped on the asphalt.In this chapter, I argue that criminalization is embedded in Oakland’s social order, that it is a fabric of everyday life. To understand why young people are policed, punished, and harassed in this city, we have to gain an understanding of Oakland’s historical legacy of criminalizing young peo-ple. Oakland has been a pioneer in the criminalization of racialized youth. At one point, during the 1960s, many of the punitive criminal justice poli-cies that would later be implemented throughout the country were cre-ated and put into practice in Oakland. Following the national advent of zero-tolerance policing, mandatory sentencing, gang enhancements (an added sentence to felony cases when the court finds a defendant guilty of committing a crime for the benefit of the gang), and mass incarceration, the city developed a powerful youth control complex, which continues to grip the lives of the young men in this study. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the youth control complex and its effects on young people.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [28]Why Oakland?Oakland’s large Black and Latino/a communities, pervasive system of policing and surveillance, dynamic youth subcultures, and large working-class and poor populations make it a compelling place for the study of inner-city youth and punitive social control.6 These factors combine to create a social landscape which epitomizes the sociological circumstances of other cities with large Black and Latino/a populations in the United States. Historian Chris Rhomberg argues in his book No There There: Race, Class and Political Community in Oakland that Oakland is an ideal city for the study of urban problems: “[Oakland] is large enough to fea-ture problems of concentration, industrialization, and population change typical of American urban centers, yet small enough to permit observa-tions of its social and political relations as a whole.”7Oakland is located in the sixth most populous metropolitan area in the United States, the San Francisco Bay Area. There are 460,000 people residing in Oakland and 7.4 million others living in the greater Bay Area.8Oakland is a young city, with 25 percent of its population under eighteen years old and 10 percent of its residents eighteen to twenty-four years old. As of 2006, Oakland’s Whites made up 36 percent of its population; Blacks, 30 percent; and Latinos, 26 percent.9 Despite these fairly equal numbers in population, youth of color are heavily segregated from White youth; over 70 percent of Black children and over 50 percent of Latino children live in neighborhoods which are segregated from Whites.10 In the flatlands, White youths are a rare population. The majority of Oak-land’s Whites are middle class and live in the hills or foothills.11 The city’s poverty rates reflect some of this segregation: Black children in Oakland live in poverty at a rate of 30 percent; Latinos, 16 percent; and Whites, 5.2 percent.12 Oakland has historically been known as the “Detroit of the West,” because of its industrial economy in the mid-twentieth century.13More recently, since the 1980s, as in Detroit, Oakland residents have experienced massive job losses due to deindustrialization. As of 2010, the unemployment rate for Oakland was 17.7 percent.14One can make a connection between the expansion of punitive social control and capitalist globalization. As industry fled, Oakland experi-enced massive job losses. This process became one of the contribut-This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [29]ing economic factors in the changing character of social control in the communities from which the young men in this study came. Sociologist William Robinson argues that capitalist globalization has resulted in a vast restructuring of the world economy, integrating all national econo-mies into a transnational global economy.15 Essentially, the proliferation of neoliberalism in the past three decades has erected a transnational global economy that frees capital to prey on vulnerable populations and resources and facilitates a transition from social-welfare to social-control, security societies. In order to understand the “trouble with young men” which takes place in the new millennium, we must understand how local troubles are often derived from global processes. In examining its effects on young, poor, racialized men in Oakland, neoliberalism has played a contributing role in producing marginalized populations abandoned by the left arm of the state (welfare) and gripped by the punitive right arm of the state (criminal justice). Today’s working-class youths encounter a radically different world than they would have encountered just a few decades ago. These young people no longer “learn to labor”16 but instead “prepare for prison.”17 Although it is well beyond the scope of this book to discuss global processes, the stories in this study may provide insight to how the global phenomenon of punishing the poor and deep investment in security industries have come to impact the everyday lives of marginal-ized young men, not just in Oakland but around the globe.18Since the 1940s, Blacks have had a strong presence in Oakland. Blacks migrated from the South to Oakland during World War II, attracted by war-industry jobs on the shipping docks of the city. By the 1960s, Blacks in Oakland became heavily involved in the civil rights and Black Power movements.19 By the 1980s, Oakland’s Black communities began to experience an intensifying intersection of heavy unemploy-ment, the “crack epidemic,” punitive crime policies, and the influx of large numbers of Latino/a immigrants. Historically, young Blacks in Oakland have faced a lack of economic opportunities and excessive criminalization. Historian Donna Murch, who has written a book on the Black Panthers, demonstrates how this group of young people was criminalized and systematically attacked by the state, by way of crime-control tactics. She explains the impact of the combination of job loss and increased juvenile policing:This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [30]In contrast to their parents, who entered the San Francisco Bay Area in a time of economic boom, postwar youth faced a rapidly disappearing indus-trial base along with increased school, neighborhood, and job segrega-tion. . . . In response to the rapidly growing, and disproportionately young, migrant population, city and state government developed a program to combat “juvenile delinquency” that resulted in high rates of police harass-ment, arrest, and incarceration.20Much of Oakland’s Latino/a population arrived during the 1980s and 1990s as immigrants, primarily from Mexico. Attracted to low-income housing in traditionally Black neighborhoods, many Latino/as moved there. Today, many traditionally Black neighborhoods have Latino/a pop-ulations constituting up to 40 percent of their residents. These once-Black areas have now become “Blaxican,” neighborhoods where Latino/a (spe-cifically Mexican) culture and Black culture continually meet and mesh. The close proximity of Black and Latino/a youth has created common subcultures, interracial relationships, and common institutional experi-ences, including similar punitive interactions with schools, police, and community members. The majority of the boys in this study analyzed their experiences as a process of collective criminalization and racialization. Young people believed that police, schools, and community members treated both Black and Latino/a youths in the very same ways. Oakland’s history may provide an answer for why this belief is prevalent. Criminal-ization and punishment were practiced and perfected on Black popula-tions. By the time a critical mass of poor Latino/as arrived in Oakland, the community and its institutions had a clear system by which to incorporate this new population: criminalization and punitive social control.AHistory of Racialized Social Control in OaklandOakland has a long history of controlling racialized populations through punitive force. Criminologist Geoff Ward defines racialized social control as the regulation and repression of a population based on its race.21 Ward argues that social control becomes a negotiated racial order. In other words, the primary way by which racialized populations are regulated is through punitive social control, which in turn establishes social control This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [31]as a race-creating system.22 Murch connects race and class with punitive social control in Oakland:In Oakland . . . racial anxieties about the city’s rapidly changing demograph-ics led to an increasing integration of school and recreational programs with police and penal authorities. In this context, the discourse of “juvenile delinquency” took on a clear racial caste, leading to wide-scale policing and criminalization of Black youth. While extensive police harassment and arrest of Black migrants started during the population influx of World War II, it vastly intensified in the period of economic decline that ensued.23Many noted scholars have argued that today’s U.S. criminal justice system has become a central mechanism for controlling and managing unem-ployed and racialized “surplus” populations.24 Scholars contend that the civil rights movement, economic crises, and other structural shifts in con-temporary society have facilitated the expansion of the criminal justice system and punitive crime-control policies.25 The civil rights movement of the 1960s provoked mass fear in mainstream America about urban ghettos. Sporadic “race riots” sparked white fright and flight. The call for “law and order” was a response to rising crime rates in the 1960s and sig-naled opposition to the ongoing civil rights and antiwar movements.26The law-and-order campaign of the late 1960s laid the foundation for a “tough on crime” movement in the 1970s and ’80s, which became the phi-losophy of the American criminal justice system for decades thereafter.27Ronald Reagan’s “War on Drugs” solidified this movement into a mass-incarceration machine.28Also wrapped up in the law-and-order movement was the subtle mes-sage to citizens about the supposed rise in Black criminal behavior. By 1969, a Harris poll reported that 81 percent of the public believed that law and order had broken down, with a majority blaming “Negroes, who start riots, and communists.”29 The New York Times, analyzing Richard Nixon’s law-and-order panacea, announced, “[Nixon] undoubtedly will empha-size order in the cities, for that is his best issue. . . . He thinks he can tame the ghettos and then reconstruct them.”30 Because Oakland was one of the nation’s hubs for the Black Power movement, it became a target for politi-cians such as Nixon and government agencies such as the CIA. The Black This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [32]Panthers—a Black youth organization started in Oakland, California, that worked for justice in the Black community—was labeled a “criminal enter-prise” by the CIA and the Oakland police, and, as a result, its members were harassed, brutalized, and incarcerated.31 Eventually, the CIA developed a sophisticated program known as COINTELPRO, designed to spy on, entrap, sabotage, and incarcerate members of the Black Panther Party.In Oakland, the person responsible for “taming the ghetto,” and spe-cifically the Black Panthers, was Edwin Meese. Meese infamously imple-mented some of the city’s harshest policing policies as Oakland’s district attorney during the 1960s. His policies sent many Black Panther mem-bers to prison. Meese was also responsible for the infamous crackdown at People’s Park in Berkeley, California, in 1969. People’s Park was a park near the University of California campus that had been taken over by stu-dent and community activists. Governor Ronald Reagan denounced this takeover and chastised UC-Berkeley students, stating that UC-Berkeley was “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants.”32Under Meese’s advice, Reagan declared a state of emergency and sent in the National Guard. One student was killed by police-inflicted shotgun wounds. Many others were severely injured.33 Meese later served as Rea-gan’s attorney general during the 1980s, implementing the same criminal-ization and repression tactics that he developed in Oakland in other Black communities throughout the nation. Practices and discourses of criminal-ization and punishment of young people in the new millennium could be directly traced to the state repression of social movements of the 1960s.Given the passion with which the Panthers were pursued, it’s easy to forget they were primarily a youth organization. Most members were still in their teens, a neglected fact that emphasizes Oakland’s long history of targeting youth of color. The Black Panthers began because Black youth in Oakland grew frustrated with being criminalized in the late 1960s.34 Ironi-cally, the founding of the Black Panther Party sparked some of the most intense criminalization of Black youth. The FBI, for example, declared the Black Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the coun-try” and used COINTELPRO to set up Black Panther Party members for conflict and incarceration.35 Such programs effectively diminished the Black Panthers’ influence by the 1970s. Left without resources for mobili-zation amid punitive securitization, deindustrialization and the decline of This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [33]social-welfare programs, gangs and drug dealing became a new modality for some marginalized young people in Oakland.36By the 1970s, conservatives such as Meese latched onto a few studies arguing that rehabilitation did not work and pushed for incapacitation through zero-tolerance policing and longer prison terms.37 Incapacitation proponents argued that as long as an offender was locked up, he could not commit crimes on the streets.38 The Reagan administration solidified the “tough on crime” campaign by emphasizing “just deserts” and eradi-cating what was left of rehabilitation programs. Funding for social pro-grams which focused on rehabilitating convicted offenders or preventing the emergence of new offenders was eliminated.39By 1987, the California legislature declared a “state of crisis caused by violent street gangs whose members threaten, terrorize, and com-mit a multitude of crimes against the peaceful citizens of their neigh-borhoods.”40 The legislature claimed that there were nearly six hundred criminal street gangs operating in California; Los Angeles alone saw 328 gang-related murders in 1986.41 By 1988, California had passed the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act, which required longer sen-tences for offenders recognized as gang members. Black and Latino youths made up the vast majority of people labeled gang members in California.42Following the tough-on-youth crime trend, California voters passed Proposition 21 in 2000. Among other strict reforms, this measure made it a felony to cause more than four hundred dollars worth of graffiti damage (before 2000, a felony charge for property damage required fifty thousand dollars or more of damage). Prop. 21 also targeted youth gang members specifically, allowing youth to be prosecuted for crimes committed by peers if the defendant was deemed to be part of the gang. Many of the boys in this study had been sentenced more severely under Prop. 21. These boys, along with many others in the community, had come to use Prop. 21 as a verb. They would say, “I got Prop. 21’d” or “My brother got Prop. 21’d,” refer-ring to the added sentence to their transgression. To compound the prob-lem, sloppy gang labeling by law enforcement—which will include young men in the database on the slightest provocation, such as wearing a certain color, dressing a certain way, or associating with known gang members—has become a serious danger for racialized youth.43 Being placed in this database increases a young person’s chances of being tried as a gang mem-This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [34]ber and given an enhanced sentence for committing any crime thereafter. This labeling leads to harsher punishment, a higher likelihood of being tried as an adult, increased surveillance, and a permanent criminal record.From 2002 to 2005 Oakland continued to focus on punitive social con-trol in attempts to reduce the crime rate. The city prioritized funding for law enforcement, resulting in declines in spending for educational and social programs. In 2002, Oakland spent $128,331 per law-enforcement employee; by 2005, this rate had increased to $190,140.44 This approach was further evident in the demands made by the Oakland City Council to the city’s new chief of police: “You said you can’t arrest our way out of this problem. Well, you sure better try. We all have our jobs to do, and your job is to arrest people.”45 As this book went to press in 2010, Oakland’s district attorney imposed its first gang injunction on a neighborhood in north Oakland. A gang injunction allows prosecutors and police to impose sanc-tions on people labeled as gang members for noncriminal acts, such as associating with other labeled gang members or visiting a neighborhood.Mass IncarcerationSince the 1970s, the incarcerated population in the United States has increased fourfold to over 2.3 million. As of 2007, one out of every one hundred Americans was behind bars.46 Massive race and age disparities are prevalent in this incarcerated population. One of every nine Black males aged twenty to thirty-four is incarcerated. One of every twenty-five Latino males and one of every fifty-six White males aged twenty to thirty-four are also incarcerated in the United States. Roughly 27 percent of the incarcerated population is Latino, while it represents 15 percent of the total U.S. population. For Blacks, the statistics demonstrate even deeper dispar-ities: roughly 50 percent of the incarcerated population is Black, while it represents 14 percent of the total U.S. population. In 2007, about 16.6 per-cent of all Black males were or had previously been incarcerated; 7.7 per-cent of all Latino males and 2.6 percent of White males had the same sta-tus. The chance of a Black male going to prison sometime in his lifetime is one in three, compared to one in six for Latino men and one in seventeen for White men.47 Thirty percent of juveniles arrested for crime are youth of color, yet they make up 58 percent of those sentenced as adults.48This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [35]Explanations for why these kinds of punitive and racialized social-con-trol disparities developed are abundant. Sociologist Loïc Wacquant argues that the practices of the punitive state, which have led to mass incarcera-tion, have become the fourth stage of racial domination for African Ameri-cans. Following slavery, the Jim Crow South, and the ghetto, the prison, according to Wacquant, has become a central pillar of racial inequality and a space in which to house poor, disreputable, racialized populations.49Other scholars argue that conservative politics and a fear of crime led to a “culture of control” whereby mass incarceration became a possibility.50 Still others argue that economic restructuring and the failure of markets in local and global contexts led to punitive policies and a boom in prison building.51Bridging the material and cultural, Christian Parenti explains that both economic and social crises are responsible for the development of mass incarceration.52 Wacquant also bridges paradigms by arguing that mass incarceration is a system by which the state deals with the urban disor-ders brought about by economic deregulation, imposing specific kinds of unsecure and underpaid jobs on racialized and poor populations.53 In addition, he contends that a “moral theater” is performed by politicians who demonize the poor in order to disguise the state’s inability to pro-vide everyday citizens with economic and social protection.54 Ultimately, Wacquant argues, incarceration has become a core political institution by which poverty has become penalized and a punitive state has developed.55I argue that punitive social control is embedded in the everyday lives of marginalized young males and that the state has not abandoned the poor but instead has punitively asserted itself into various institutions in the community. Ironically, this system of punitive social control, historically developed to control dissent, ends up developing the conditions by which some of these young people become politically conscious and politicized.Collateral ConsequencesWhile there are many sophisticated explanations for why unprecedented punitive policies and incarceration rates have developed in the United States over the past forty years, few scholars have examined the every-day effects of this phenomenon on marginalized populations.56 Mass incarceration was an everyday reality for the boys I studied in Oakland.57This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [36]Fourteen of the boys in this study had parents in prison or jail during the three-year span that I studied them.58 Many of the older men in the neighborhood—who often had considerable influence on the youth—were convicts. Often, they would return from prison to the neighbor-hood, attempt to change, find few alternatives, and eventually prey on young people to make money. This would inevitably lead many of them to return to jail or prison or to influence young people to commit crimes that would lead them to incarceration.59When the forty boys in the main group were asked to write down the names of close friends and family members who were currently incar-cerated, all of them knew at least six people. One of them, Spider, knew thirty-two. He wrote down their name and age and rated, from 1 to 5, how close he felt to them. When the boys were asked to respond to the ques-tion “From 1 to 5, 5 being the highest and 1 being the lowest, how likely do you think you are to get incarcerated in the next few months?” all of them responded with at least a 4, meaning that they all felt that their chances of being incarcerated were high or extremely high. Many of the boys held the same belief that criminologists Mark Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind have articulated: “It is not difficult to imagine that neighborhoods beset by social ills are not well served when boys and girls perceive that going to prison may be a more likely prospect than going to college.”60 The young men in this study discussed prison as a familiar place. Since many of the adults they looked up to were convicts, as opposed to college grad-uates, and police and school personnel often treated them like prisoners, the youths became familiar with the culture and rules of prison life and even attached a sense of glamour and admiration to it, before ever serving a day in an adult jail or prison.61The effects of punitive social-control policies and mass incarceration are so widespread that scholars have come up with the term “collateral consequences” to describe them.62 The collateral consequences of mass incarceration are those negative predicaments in which families, com-munities, and individuals find themselves as a result of their incarcera-tion or the incarceration of their family members or neighbors. Mauer and Chesney-Lind argue that “with the unprecedented expansion of the prison system over three decades has come a complex network of invis-ible punishments affecting families and communities nationwide.”63This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [37]Studies have found that the children of the incarcerated suffer psycho-logically, their families suffer economically, their communities lose adults who would otherwise contribute to incomes and families, and former inmates lose the right to vote.64 The aftereffects of incarceration include permanent stigma, the loss of opportunities to receive federal and state assistance (e.g., public housing and student loans) or accredited certifi-cation in several trades (e.g., automotive, construction, and plumbing), and the loss of one of the fundamental rights of citizenship, the right to vote. These consequences lead to the preclusion of released inmates from positive social networks and to chronic unemployment.65 Other, more residual collateral consequences are uncovered when we study these mar-ginalized populations at a more in-depth, social relational level.Very few urban ethnographies have examined punishment as a sys-tem that grips the lives of inner-city, street-oriented youths.66 Sociologist Alice Goffman notes that, “although ethnographic accounts should argu-ably capture what enhanced policing and supervision has meant for the dynamics of daily life in poor minority communities, most ethnographies were written before the criminal justice system became such a prevalent institution in the life of the poor.”67 In the past, ethnographers reported that police had a minimal presence in the inner city.68 One exception is sociologist Elijah Anderson’s 1990 study “The Police and the Black Male,” in which he found young black males encountering constant surveillance and overpolicing: “The police appear to engage in an informal policy of monitoring young black men as a means of controlling crime, and often they seem to go beyond the bounds of duty.”69 In Oakland, policing, sur-veillance, and criminalization played a major role in the lives of black and Latino street-oriented youths. Street-oriented youths were equally as concerned and impacted by punishment as they were by violence, drugs, crime, and gangs. Not only had the criminal justice system become a prevalent part of the lives of these young people, it had also embedded its logic and practices into other institutions in the community, which then also stigmatized and criminalized the youths. Various institutions in the community became part of a ubiquitous system of punishment that impacted the boys on a daily basis.These consequences are best understood by taking into account that the criminal justice system has been used as a template for solving other This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [38]social problems, such as poverty, school truancy, school failure, family conflict, and youth delinquency.70 Legal scholar Jonathan Simon argues that this punitive shift has resulted in a society that is governed through crime.71 He contends that crime is no longer regulated solely by the crimi-nal justice system but that policing has been extended to other institu-tions such as schools, welfare offices, workplaces, and domestic spheres. For example, schools deal with “problem students” as potential crimi-nals, sometimes referring them to police before they have even com-mitted a crime. Thus, teachers become like prison guards, monitoring potential threats and making sure students follow strict orders. In fact, Simon argues, the role of government in the new millennium is to govern through crime. From this perspective, the government appeases citizens by giving them a sense of security through harsh criminal sanctions and strict school and workplace regulations. Private companies bolster such arrangements by developing state-of-the-art auto, home, personal, and business security systems. Simon argues that when we govern through crime, ideas about dealing with criminals become embedded in every-day life. Citizens and government alike use these ideas to “frame all social action as a problem of governance.”72According to Simon, the language of the criminal justice system has so permeated all aspects of social life that we have come to believe that crime control is the solution to all social ills. He argues that the “technologies, discourses, and metaphors of crime and criminal justice have become more visible features of all kinds of institutions, where they can easily gravitate into new opportunities for governance.”73 One concrete exam-ple of this is zero-tolerance policies in schools. Zero-tolerance policies derive from policing strategies, developed in the 1980s, that were designed to crack down on serious crime by punishing small offenses which were thought to lead to more serious crimes. Some schools in my study have implemented “three strikes” programs, in which students are referred to police after their third disciplinary infraction. This policy is modeled on California’s “three strikes” law, which requires a mandatory sentence of twenty-five years to life for anyone convicted of a third felony. Simon concludes that “social problems of all varieties are now treated as a crime problem: poverty, adolescent deviance, and workplace and school con-flict.”74 In this book, I build on Simon’s work by empirically demonstrat-This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [39]ing how governing through crime functions on an everyday level and how this new form of governance creates blocked opportunity, negative cre-dentials, and, paradoxically, a political conscious for the boys in this study.Sociologist Devah Pager argues that the state serves as a “credentializ-ing institution, providing official and public certification of those among us who have been convicted of wrongdoing.”75 Scores of young Black and Latino men receive credentials from the state that permanently mark them as incompetent and dangerous citizens. Further, Pager argues that “the credential of a criminal record, like educational or professional cre-dentials, constitutes a formal and enduring classification of social status, which can be used to regulate access and opportunity across numerous social, economic, and political domains.”76 I found that the boys in this study experienced the process of receiving negative credentials, even prior to having a criminal record. In the era of mass incarceration, nega-tive credentials go beyond a criminal record; some young and poor Black and Latino boys are conferred with negative credentials from a young age. Negative credentials in this sense come in the form of the criminal-ization of style and behaviors labeled as deviant at school, by police, and in the community. Institutions in the community coalesce to mark young people as dangerous risks for noncriminal deviant behavior and, as such, deny them affirmation and dignified treatment through stigmatizing and exclusionary practices. As a result, young people strive for dignity, so that their social relations, interactions, and everyday activities become organized around maintaining their freedom and feeling empowered in a social landscape that seems to deny them basic human acknowledg-ment.77 While some scholars believe that these kinds of young people are aggressively searching for respect, for others to pay them homage and help them earn their “stripes,” I find that these young men are, at a more basic level, striving for dignity, demanding to be treated as fellow citizens who are innocent until proven guilty. Working for dignity has to do more with a sense of humanity than a sense of power. Social psycholo-gists who study the law have found that the way that people experience the legal system has much more to do with whether they feel they have been treated fairly than with the actual legal outcome. “Procedures and procedural behavior that violate basic norms of politeness will be seen as unfair both because the basic normative rules that are violated are valued This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [40]in their own right and because impolite behavior denies the recipient’s dignity as a full-status member of the group.”78 In other words, margin-alized Black and Latino young men’s actions must be understood in the context of wanting to be acknowledged, to feel accepted, to feel human, instead of the typical assessment that they are power-hungry, preemptive, respect-seeking individuals, as most accounts make them out to be. In the era of mass incarceration, when marginalized young people are gov-erned through crime and marked with negative credentials, many strive to maintain their dignity and persist in a social ecology where they are managed by a youth control complex.TheYouth Control ComplexThe youth control complex is a ubiquitous system of criminalization molded by the synchronized, systematic punishment meted out by social-izing and social control institutions. This complex is the unique whole derived from the sum of the punitive parts that young people encounter. While being called a “thug” by a random adult may seem trivial to some people, when a young person is called a “thug” by a random adult, told by a teacher that he or she will never amount to anything, and frisked by a police officer, all in the same day, this combination becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It becomes a unique formation—the youth control complex—taking a toll on the mind and future outcomes of this young person. This complex is the combined effect of the web of institutions, schools, families, businesses, residents, media, community centers, and the criminal justice system, that collectively punish, stigmatize, monitor, and criminalize young people in an attempt to control them.The youth control complex is composed of material and symbolic criminalization. Material criminalization includes police harassment, exclusion from businesses and public recreation spaces, and the enforce-ment of zero-tolerance policies that lead to detention rooms, school suspensions, and incarceration. Symbolic criminalization includes the surveillance, profiling, stigma, and degrading interactions that young people regularly endure. Symbolic punishment, as it relates to race, can be understood as “racial microaggressions.”79 Racial microaggressions are those subtle acts of racism that people of color experience on a daily This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [41]basis, such as being followed by security at a store, being stopped by police for matching the description of a criminal gang member, or being ignored at school by counselors because they are not expected to make it to college. These are microaggressions because at any given moment, the police, security, and counselors can justify their behavior by saying some-thing like, “That was not racist; I was following the law.” If a young person complains and calls this racism, authorities often retort by claiming the youth “is playing the race card.” Although a few occasional encounters with these racial microaggressions may not prove to be harmful, consis-tent negative encounters lead young people to become adversarial toward the system, to lose faith in it, to resist against it, or to build resilience skills to cope. As nineteen-year-old Emiliano, a former gang member who became politically active, told me, “Racism makes some people break, but it makes others break records.” Emiliano believed that punitive polic-ing, zero-tolerance school policies, and the criminalization of Black and Brown youth in the media are all part of a system of racism that is inten-tionally attempting to incapacitate young people of color. One result, for example, was Emiliano’s understanding of punishment as a central strug-gle for young, poor people of color and his belief that this is one of the central mechanisms by which they became politically active.Emiliano and many of the other youths developed political identities based on their resistance to criminalization and the youth control com-plex. Marginalized young people who encounter racialized punitive treat-ment are “not just humans-in-the-making, but resourceful social actors who take an active role in shaping their daily experiences.”80 I found that the young men in this study recognized, had a clear analysis of, and were resisting the criminalization they encountered. This resistance came in dif-ferent forms. Some resisted by committing violent crime, others by orga-nizing themselves and blocking off their streets with stolen cars and con-crete slabs so police cars were unable to access them; and others resisted by becoming political organizers and returning to school. Much of the lit-erature on mass incarceration has not been able to account for agency and resistance in the people most impacted by the punitive state. Furthermore, some scholars have assumed that people in the ghetto are socially disorga-nized and are not able to persist and create their own social efficacy—the ability to take control of their social settings in order to solve social prob-This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex [42]lems they encounter.81 Agency is lost and the ghetto incapacitated. In con-trast, the young people in this study were constantly resisting. Some of their deviance was a form of resistance to punitive social control.Whereas some of the young men attempted to overcome their crimi-nalization by resisting, others embraced the support they received from the few institutional actors who acknowledged them. Youths who encountered less punitive forms of control were able to see themselves overcoming the youth control complex. In this sense, those who desisted did so because they encountered an alternative form of social control, one that was “informal, decentralized, inclusive and non-stigmatic, lying somewhere outside the tentacles of the organized state systems of crimi-nal law, criminal justice, imprisonment, and punishment.”82 But while most adults in the community might attempt to support young people, they may be limited by inadequate policies, philosophies, programming, or financial resources to provide deviant youths with successful alterna-tives that might allow them to reform. As such, these often well-intended adults often fall back on the dominant resources available to them: zero-tolerance policies, punitive policing, and criminal justice discourses and programs. Oakland has a long history of managing marginalized young people through punitive social control, criminalization, and marking them with negative credentials.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:27 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
NYU PressChapter Title: The Labeling Hype: Coming of Age in the Era of Mass Incarceration Book Title: Punished Book Subtitle: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys Book Author(s): Victor M. Rios Published by: NYU Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16f99dh.7JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/termsNYU Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PunishedThis content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
[43]3The Labeling HypeComing of Age in the Era of Mass IncarcerationThe disparaging view of young people has promulgated the rise of a punishing and (in)security industry whose discourses, technologies, and practices have become visible across a wide range of spaces and institutions.—Henry Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, 2009Overall, ethnic minority youths, gang or non-gang, resent the “dissing” (disrespect) meted out by patrol officers. . . . Once youths have begun to reject the law and its underlying values, they often develop a resistance orientation and take a defiant and destructive stance.—James Diego Vigil, A Rainbow of Gangs, 2002Tyrell, a Black youth, and Jose, a Latino youth, both sixteen years old, sat on a splintered wood bench at the bus stop on the corner of 35th and International, in front of Hernandez Meat Market. Right above them, a pig and the head of a cow, painted on the meat-market wall, stared straight down at them. A street sign, adjacent to the bus stop, read, “All activity on this block is being recorded.” I leaned back on the sign, as I observed and listened to Tyrell and Jose. They looked around: Jose stared This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[44]at people in cars, while Tyrell looked at a group of four teenage Black boys walking across the street.I was shadowing Tyrell and Jose as they made their way home from school. Tyrell lived close to 65th Avenue; and Jose, past 80th Avenue. They were having a conversation about their principal. “Man! Mr. Schwartz is an asshole! He be on one, man [gets crazy]!” Tyrell told Jose. Jose rubbed his head and replied, “Dude just called the police on me today.” When I asked why, he answered, “’Cause he said I was threaten-ing him. But all I did was tell him that if he called the police, they had nothing on me. . . . He said, ‘Oh, yeah, all right. Let’s see.’ And then he called them.” Jose dug into the baggy black jeans’ pocket that sat close to his knee and handed me a yellow citation given to him by the police offi-cer. At the top it read, “Notice to Appear,” with the number 0188546XX. In the middle was Jose’s violation: “CPC 647 Dist. Peace.” “Dude [police officer] came by and just started writing me a ticket. He said he would arrest me, but he had some other shit to do.”“What did you do?” I asked.“Shit, disturbed the peace at school. . . . I talked back to the principal. That’s what I get.”Tyrell responded, “Homey, that’s nothing. You should see all the times they’ve stopped me for little shit, like looking at them crazy or walking down the street.”During three years of observations I counted forty-two citations imposed on the boys. Loitering, disturbing the peace, drinking in public, not wear-ing a properly fitted bicycle helmet, and violating curfew were among the violations they received citations for. Minor citations for “little shit” played a crucial role in pipelining many of the young men in this study deeper into the criminal justice system. Some of the boys missed their court dates; others appeared in court but could not pay their citations. This led to war-rants for arrest or probation. Warrants and probationary status marked the young men for further criminalization. Police, school personnel, and probation officers would graduate the boys to a new level of policing and harassment. Being on probation, for instance, meant that the boys could be stopped, searched, or reported, at any given moment. Probation sta-tus provided the youth control complex a carte blanche in its endeavor to This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[45]stigmatize, punish, and exclude young people. When a young person is on probation, he is left with few rights; he can be stopped and searched for no reason, and he can be arrested for noncriminal transgressions such as hang-ing out with his friends or walking in the wrong part of the neighborhood.In this chapter, I argue that labeling is not just a process whereby schools, police, probation officers, and families stigmatize the boys, and, in turn, their delinquency persists or increases.1 In the era of mass incar-ceration, labeling is also a process by which agencies of social control fur-ther stigmatize and mark the boys in response to their original label.2 This in turn creates a vicious cycle that multiplies the boys’ experiences with criminalization, what I call a labeling hype. I found that the boys in this study felt outcast, shamed, and unaccepted, sometimes leading them to a sense of hopelessness and a “deviant self-concept.”3 In addition, I also found that the young men were caught in a spiral of punitive responses imposed by institutions which labeled them as deviant. Being labeled or marked for minor transgressions would place the boys at risk for being granted additional, more serious labels.Institutions became involved in a spiral of criminalization that began with informal, trivial labels, such as “This kid comes from a bad family and is at-risk.” This label alone would sometimes lead to more detrimen-tal labels, such as “This kid is delinquent, and he is a risk.” Criminologist Paul Hirschfield argues that labels have little impact on the individual identities of marginalized black males, but they have a big effect on young people’s social mobility. He posits that “mass criminalization” is respon-sible for “social exclusion” and “diminished social expectations.”4 In the era of mass incarceration, labeling not only generates criminality; it also perpetuates criminalization.Previous studies in urban ethnography have done an exceptional job at describing blocked opportunity and its consequences.5 However, crimi-nalization as a system that contributes to this blocked opportunity has yet to be analyzed. This system had such an extensive influence on the lives of the boys in this study that many of them were criminalized even when they were victims of crime. Criminalization became internalized by many of the boys, even leading some to believe that they did not deserve protection from the police. Tyrell’s and Jose’s life stories show the process by which young men come of age in Oakland being labeled as deviant This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[46]and eventually being treated like criminals. In this respect, they are repre-sentative of many of the other boys in this study.Historian Robin Kelley argues that academics have contributed to society’s understanding of poor Black populations as pathological and nihilistic, by creating stories that only focus on compensatory behaviors. Sometimes, Kelley argues, researchers overemphasize and exaggerate the resistant and adaptive strategies of the poor and present them to the mainstream world as indicators of pathologies or as negative responses to a system that victimizes them.6 By focusing on the boys’ worldviews about their negative encounters with social control agents and by look-ing at the creative responses they develop, I hope to move beyond under-standing marginalized populations as only victims, or pathological, or compensatory conduct driven. This endeavor begins by paying close attention to the life stories of these young people and their perspectives on the structural predicaments in which they live.The bus arrived. Tyrell and Jose changed their conversation about police and citations. Tyrell asked me, “So you still wanna go to the Ville?” I told him I did. The “Ville” was a low-income housing project located on 66th Avenue and International. Tyrell spent most of his childhood there. Although he had recently moved out, he hung out there every day with his friends, in an alley that residents refer to as “Death Alley.” We got on the bus and remained silent, observing the twenty or so other teenagers sardined inside. Tyrell and I got off the bus and silently nodded to Jose, who remained on the bus heading further down International. When we arrived at the Ville, I asked Tyrell to give me a tour, from his perspective, and tell me about growing up in this environment.Tyrell’s Too TallSince the late 1980s, the Ville housing project has been notorious for its crime rate.7 Famous former residents include Felix Mitchell, who estab-lished one of the most influential crack-cocaine gang empires in the country there during the ’80s. Mitchell was killed in prison in 1986, but he is still a legend in this community. The 1991 film New Jack City used Mitchell’s life as the basis for one of its main characters, Nino Brown. This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[47]Tyrell and his friends still talk about Mitchell: “Mitchell was a true G [gangster]. . . . He is like the only role model we got,” said Tyrell. This statement is indicative of the lack of programs in schools or in the com-munity, which could have exposed young people to professional and col-lege-educated role models.The Ville, notorious for its drug trafficking and violence, consisted of rows and rows of two-story, shoebox-shaped apartment buildings, with metal window and door gates—the epitome of West Coast housing proj-ects. The new two-tone light-beige and pink paint and fancy geometric trim on the top of some of the recently remodeled buildings belied the bullet holes in apartment windows, the homemade tin-foil crack pipes laying on the lawns, and the dire poverty of little kids fighting to ride the only neighborhood bike. The city had recently demolished similar build-ings down the street and in their place developed modern townhouse-style projects, shaped like squares, with attractive geometrical rooftops and three-tone light-beige, yellow, and green paint jobs. These new hous-ing developments were juxtaposed with drug dealers standing at the cor-ner, with middle-aged crack addicts pacing about in desperation and the bloody street fights that constantly took place in the Ville. The millions of dollars spent on physical upgrades could not bandage the persistence of violence, crime, and criminalization that could only be transformed by implementing programs which could change the social order and social control of the neighborhood, not just its physical appearance.8 If certain social contexts breed criminality, then certain social contexts breed crimi-nalization. The cycle of crime and violence cannot be addressed by chang-ing the appearance of a place and incarcerating its denizens; we must start by changing the social contexts that provide actors the resources for par-taking in specific behaviors and by transforming the ways in which we perceive and treat—criminalize or incorporate—these populations.As we walked around the Ville, Tyrell pointed to different locations that ignited his memory: where he first got high, where he first witnessed a murder in Death Alley, and where the police brutalized him for the very first time. Tyrell looked at me when we got to “death alley,” an alley that residents understood as a space where deadly violence was a regular presence, and asked, “What do you want to know?” The space seemed to spark a desire in Tyrell to share his story. We sat on a giant piece of bro-This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[48]ken concrete which was used to form a retaining wall between the alley and a now-abandoned house.Tyrell was raised by his father, John. According to Tyrell, his mother had left them for a man who made a good living selling crack. “She told my dad, ‘You ain’t shit, can’t even get a job,’ so she bounced.” Soon after, she became addicted to crack. According to Tyrell, his mother’s boyfriend was also a crack user and passed the addiction on to her. Tyrell’s mother showed up sporadically, asking him and his grandmother for money to support her addiction. “She smokes so much crack, she calls herself ‘Bub-bles,’” Tyrell told me. On another day, when I was hanging out with Tyrell in Death Alley, where he and his friends would convene every afternoon, Tyrell’s mother came around the corner. She asked him, “Have you seen Mo?” Tyrell nodded, looking embarrassed. She asked me for money, and I told her I would give Tyrell some money on her behalf. She thanked me for what she perceived as my helping her son and walked off, through an alley onto an adjacent block. This situation was not unique to Tyrell: eigh-teen of the boys in the study reported having at least one parent who had problems with drugs or alcohol.Tyrell was homeless for part of his childhood, sleeping in cars, shel-ters, crack houses, and in the parking lot of the Ville. In Tyrell’s account, the housing authority did not want to provide his father housing. “Because he was not a woman . . . they told him that he had no reason for not having a job.” Tyrell’s dad was a mechanic but could not find work at the time:He worked on other people’s cars, but they were broke too. They gave him five, ten dollars, but he couldn’t pay rent with this. So we ended up at other people’s houses or in our car most of the time. . . . One day a crack head [addict] told us she was moving back to Atlanta. She said that we could live in her apartment if we wanted, but we had to pay rent. This is when we got our own place. I was hella happy knowing that I would have my own place. That’s crazy, I was happy, ’cause I was gonna live in the projects. . . . It was hella fun living there.Despite the surrounding violence, drug abuse, and poverty—as well as the consequential trauma, homelessness, and hunger—Tyrell remem-This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[49]bers having a fun childhood. His father taught him about being respect-ful to others and obeying the law no matter how poor they were. “Pops wouldn’t steal from nobody. He would rather starve than steal,” Tyrell told me. John attempted to keep Tyrell sheltered from the effects of pov-erty; sometimes it worked. John taught him that some police officers were good and encouraged him to be the cop when he played cops and robbers. By the second or third grade, all his friends made fun of him for playing the cop. By then, most of his peers believed that the police were a negative force in the community, but Tyrell still believed that police had the power to “take the bad people away from the Ville.”Despite not having the resources to provide “proper” parenting, such as help with homework or money for school trips or work clothes, the major-ity of the boys’ parents attempted to instill positive values in their children, even if some of them did not have a standard definition of mainstream val-ues. Often, parents became desperate in their failed attempts to guide their children. This led some parents to ask probation, police, or school officials to teach them strategies for parenting their children. As these institutions advised desperate individuals on how to parent their children, they passed on their punitive approaches to treating deviant and delinquent behavior. In a sense, they taught parents how to criminalize their own children.Sociologist Ross Matsueda finds that informal labels, negative treat-ment, and stigma derived from a perception of criminality are imposed on individuals who have committed crime but also are imposed on individ-uals who are from a group or community perceived to be criminogenic. Matsueda finds that these informal labels have an effect on the labeled individual’s perceptions of how others see him. Matsueda also finds that some parents actively participate in the process of labeling their children.9In chapter 4, I discuss the ways in which some parents label and criminal-ize their children, often under the influence of the criminal justice system.In fourth grade, an older Tyrell and his homies would walk a few miles to the Oakland Coliseum, located two miles from the Ville, when the Oakland Athletics or Oakland Raiders played games. “We would walk like twenty blocks to the Coliseum to watch the games. They wouldn’t let us in, so we stood outside on the very top and looked through the cracks between the fence. The guys [players] were this little [he measures about an inch with his thumb and index finger], but we still got to see ’em, they hit This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[50]a homerun.” Police chased Tyrell and his friends off the Coliseum grounds. He could not understand why they were so aggressive toward him, when he was “just trying to watch a game.” According to Tyrell, police threatened him and his friends with arrest if they continued to loiter at the Coliseum.By the sixth grade, Tyrell felt that he could no longer exist outside the violence that defined the Ville. “Sixth grade is where it all went down. Cops started beating on me, fools [peers] started getting hyphy [crazy] with me. I had to get into, um, lots of fights,” Tyrell said. He told me that his height contributed to his forced entry into street life. In the sixth grade, Tyrell was the tallest student in school. He remembered going into class on the first day of sixth grade, and his teacher, Mrs. Turpin, would not stop staring at him. Tyrell became bothered and asked her, “What you lookin’ at?” She used his comment as a lesson to the class that everyone was to respect the teacher. She kicked him out of class and told the principal she was “threatened” by Tyrell. Twenty-two of the boys reported feeling as if their teachers were scared of them.Tyrell believes that the teacher was not the only person who saw him as a threat, because of his height, when he was younger. In his account, because he looked like a man by age twelve, he also became a target of constant police surveillance and random checks for drugs or criminal suspicions:The five-o [police] stopped me all the time. They checked me for drugs and guns most of the time. At first I was scared and told them I was only twelve. They didn’t believe me and kept asking me where I was hiding the drugs. That made me hella mad ’cause I wasn’t slanging [selling drugs] or anything. On mama’s [I promise] I wasn’t slanging. I said, fuck it. So a few months later I started selling weed.Tyrell’s perspective was that he could not control his height, physical appearance, or the perceptions that others had of him. The one thing he could control was making the choice to sell drugs to support him-self. Tyrell’s decision to sell drugs is representative of the patterns that I found among all the boys during their first arrest. They chose to commit a crime, consciously calculating the potential risk of arrest and incarcera-tion. Many of the boys came to this assessment after believing that they had no other choice, that they had nothing to lose.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[51]In my observations, I noticed that Tyrell had a compelling presence. Police officers whom he had never encountered before targeted Tyrell more often than the other Black and Latino youths I hung out with. Over the course of three years, I watched or heard from Tyrell about being stopped by police twenty-one times, more than any other youth in this study. Most of the time, these stops ended with just a short conversation. But sometimes, police officers seemed threatened by Tyrell, and they either handcuffed him, pulled a gun on him, or put him in the patrol car.Meanwhile, according to Tyrell, his father increasingly took his stress and anger out on Tyrell. John grew frustrated at his inability to find a steady job. Despite his charisma and exceptional mechanic skills, he could not find regular work. He was only able to find employment in the local informal economy: poor local residents would bring their cars to him for repairs but were not able to pay enough for him to make a liv-ing. In the Ville, no matter what time of day, I always saw John working on someone’s car. He was always cheerful and joked around with every-one in the neighborhood. While John had all the characteristics of a sup-portive father, his lack of economic resources led Tyrell to realize that he would have to “hustle” for his own money:I told him I had a little money, and he knew where I got it from. He got hella mad and beat me down. He told me he did not want me selling that shit. I told him it was only weed, but he didn’t care. He told me that I would end up selling crack. I think he didn’t want me to start smoking that. . . . I stopped selling it for a while, but we both were broke. This is when I started selling at school again but just didn’t tell him.In Tyrell’s worldview, he made a conscious choice to commit crime within the context of the limited resources available to him and the vilifi-cation he encountered at school and with police. To the extent that mate-rial resources became scarce, and he became constructed as a deviant, he calculated that his only choice was to sell drugs. His father’s inability to provide for him, and the stigma that school officials and police officers imposed on him, left Tyrell feeling trapped. In this constricted location, Tyrell’s options were few, and one of the only lucrative options available at the time was to sell drugs. He dropped out of school and dedicated This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[52]himself to making money on the streets. Breaking the law was his deci-sion, yet his hand was largely forced by overdetermined structural condi-tions. In Tyrell’s perspective, poverty and criminalization “pushed” him into selling drugs, but he also consciously took this “jump,” knowing that this was one of the only ways he could make some money.10Tyrell had agency to decide whether he would commit crime or not. But a system of punitive social control established a context for Tyrell in which he felt disconnected from his community, stigmatized, and socially outcast, leading him to see criminality as almost inevitable. As such, Tyrell was punished into believing something external to his sense of self: that he was a criminal, that he had nothing at stake, and that he “might as well handle business”—sell drugs and victimize others—since he has “nothing to lose.” All the young men in this study believed that they were inherently criminal: their interactions with the world around them had led them to internalize a foreign concept, that criminality was part of their persona. Tyrell, like many other marginalized youth, experienced a life-course process in which he was systematically punished into believ-ing that he had nothing to lose. In the context of punitive social control, some marginalized boys are fostered by punishment, at every stage in their development, encountering a social world that, in their account, treats them as suspects and criminals.Although I was not present during the boys’ various stages of child-hood development, the three years I spent in the field taught me that their perceptions of a punitive social order were rational and reasonable. One only needs to spend a few hours with marginalized young people in their everyday settings to realize how much they are policed, stigmatized, and treated differently from other citizens. Their stories were corroborated by observations of similar events that took place during my time in the field.Jose Learns the CodeThree days after that day with Tyrell, I repeated my bus-stop routine of catching up with Jose and Tyrell. I met them at the same bus stop, con-versed with them, and rode the bus. This time, I got off the bus with Jose. We walked to a liquor store on the corner of 80th and International, purchased two Coca-Colas and two bags of Flamin’ Hot Fries, and leaned against the This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[53]store’s wall outside, staring at a 1980s white delivery truck that had been used as a canvas by the neighborhood youth to tag their street names and territo-ries. Jose proudly stared at his tag name, “Topo,” written in black spray paint on the belly of the delivery truck. We walked a few blocks to his apartment complex, where we sat on the concrete steps. After we sat idly for about twenty minutes, I asked Jose to tell me about growing up there.Jose had lived his whole life in the heart of the neighborhood that hosted one of Oakland’s largest gangs, which I will call the East Side Gang-sters (ESG). A few times in his early teenage years, his mother attempted to move him to Berkeley, a neighboring city she thought might be safer. However, the high rent prices always forced the family to return to the same apartment in Oakland. Their apartment complex was the main hang-out for the gang. The complex sat adjacent to a neighborhood liquor store, where drug dealers, drug addicts, and gang members congregated. The apartment complex was shaped like a horseshoe, with three floors on each of the three sides. Clothes were hung to dry on the building’s loose metal rails; old tennis shoes hung from the electric lines that ran in front of the complex; and the small parking lot served as a soccer field for little kids, a car-repair area for unemployed men, a drug-stashing area for dealers, and, on the weekends, a dance ballroom for families celebrating baptisms, birthday parties, and quinceaneras.11 For as long as Jose could remember, the gang loitered in the parking lot of his apartment complex, often block-ing the steps that led to Jose’s apartment. “They would, like, just do stupid stuff, like scare us [the apartment-building families], like shoot their guns and break shit and fight. I used to be hella scared of them,” explained Jose.Jose remembered being terrified of the gang at age six or seven. He yearned for the police to protect him and his family from the gang. One day, when he was about ten years old, a teenage gang member pushed him as he returned home from buying a gallon of milk from the liquor store for his family. Jose fell back, landing on the gallon of milk. White fluid splattered everywhere. The teenage boys laughed at him. He began to cry. Soaked, he returned home to tell his mother. She yelled at him, “Pendejo [idiot], don’t you know we don’t have money for more milk?” Jose wanted the gang members to pay for another gallon of milk. He left the house and walked the neighborhood, looking for a police officer. When he found a patrol car, he told the officer about the incident and This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[54]wanted the officer to talk to the gang members and ask them to buy his family another gallon of milk. According to Jose, the officer laughed at him and told him, “I got better things to do.”In my observations, I counted twenty-two instances when police were called to solve “minor” community problems such as disputes, bully-ing, harassment, and vandalism. In these twenty-two instances, police were only able or willing to intervene in these “minor” issues one time. In the other twenty-one cases, the officers either ignored residents who called or took down information and left the scene. This is indicative of the underpolicing that I found in this study. It may seem contradictory to say that young people are hypercriminalized by law enforcement but that their communities are also underpoliced. However, Jose’s experience and my observations confirm what many of the other boys reported: officers consistently police certain kinds of deviance and crime, while neglecting or ignoring other instances when their help is needed. One reason for this may be that officers follow the path of least resistance. They police easy targets, such as youth who visibly display their deviance and delin-quency. These kids, whom police have come to criminalize, are some-times the same ones who need help when they are victimized. Officers may be less sympathetic to those populations that they have rendered criminal. This process I refer to as the overpolicing-underpolicing para-dox. Policing seemed to be a ubiquitous part of the lives of many of these marginalized young people; however, the law was rarely there to protect them when they encountered victimization.Jose remembered the milk incident as a moment when he decided he would begin to take justice into his own hands.12 Jose recounted that after this incident, he began to develop a tough demeanor and increas-ingly turned to violence in an attempt to prevent victimization.13 He even joined the same gang that harassed him as a child.VR:Being tough at a young age, did that protect you from being attacked?Jose:[Smacks his lips] You know, Vic, I tried to be hella hard, and I ended up getting beat down even more.VR:Like, what were some things that you remember happening to you after trying to be tough?This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[55]Jose:So, that one time with the milk, I went and got a bat and went up to the dude that pushed me. He grabbed the bat from me and pushed me to the ground. I thought he was gonna crack me in the head. But he thought I was too little. I went home hella pissed off.Sociologist Elijah Anderson finds that appearing aggressive and will-ing to commit violence is a self-defense process for some inner-city residents, part of what he calls “the code of the street.” This code offers individuals a way to protect themselves from victimization in violent communities and to build respect from others: “In service to this ethic, repeated displays of ‘nerve’ and ‘heart’ build or reinforce a credible repu-tation for vengeance that works to deter aggression and disrespect, which are sources of great anxiety on the inner-city street.”14 Anderson goes on to show that the code of the street is embedded in everyday interaction across various institutions in the community: “The ‘code of the street’ is not the goal or product of any individual’s actions but is the fabric of everyday life, a vivid and pressing milieu within which all local residents must shape their personal routines, income strategies, and orientations to schooling, as well as their mating, parenting, and neighbor relations.”15Preemptively attacking an enemy to prevent future victimization is a key element of the code.16 Jose’s story is representative of the other boys who reported using the code in attempts to protect themselves. The code became amplified when Jose joined the gang, because now he became part of a group whose central motive was to collectively attack others to prevent and avenge victimization. Jose joined because he wanted to pre-vent being victimized by the neighborhood gang. A double bind became apparent in Jose’s endeavor to protect himself: while the gang protected Jose from specific kinds of victimization, such as being attacked by non-gang members, he experienced more victimization by rival gang mem-bers after joining the gang. The boys seemed to understand that preemp-tively attacking others would lead to further victimization. However, they chose to do so as a means of feeling a sense of justice for crimes that had been committed against them and gone unresolved. The code of the street was used as a form of street justice when the formal justice system had failed them.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[56]Some of this victimization was at best ignored and at worst condoned by the police. Jose explained, for instance, that when he was a child he could not understand why the police wouldn’t just take all the gang members to jail since they all carried weapons. When he became a gang member, he came to his own conclusion. Jose explained that the police allowed them to loiter and sell drugs within the confines of their apart-ment complex because they were not visible to the public and therefore were not a problem the police would be held accountable for. During my time observing the complex while hanging out with Jose and his friends, I found a pattern that affirmed this assumption. Police were often stationed at the street corner but would never enter the complex, even when fights and drug use were clearly visible. However, once young people walked to the street corner, police would proceed to harass and arrest them, as is evident in the following story from one of the forty boys in the study, J.T., whom I met through Jose and who lived in the same complex: “When I was young, we didn’t know nothing about the laws, so they always tried to scare us when we were little, telling us they would take us to juvenile hall. ’Cause, like, we would throw rocks at cars or do lil’ things or even just hanging out on the corner. They would tell us to go home, and they would handcuff us if we didn’t listen. . . . We were like six [years old].” Thus, in this apartment complex, young boys, as early as age six, learned from police the spatial terrain in which they could be deviant and commit crime. Criminalization created spatial demarcation; police set parameters for where individuals could loiter or commit crime. The consequences of “playing” or “hanging out” beyond the established limits of invisible and marginalized spaces included brutalization, harassment, and arrest. For the older boys, this spatial demarcation structured the rules governing the code of the street: gang members were allowed to commit violence and victimize others, as long as the acts were committed within the con-fines of the apartment complex, which law enforcement underpoliced.Residents suffered from the concentration of gang members who had been contained in these invisible spaces by police.17 Often, families—women and children—became the victims of a small handful of predatory gang members whom police neglected to apprehend. In this apartment complex, out of a group of about thirty boys, two of them were the ones that incited, provoked, and caused most of the assaults and crimes that This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[57]occurred while I was there. Everyone in the complex knew who they were, and many residents seemed anxious when these two boys came around. A mother who lived in the complex told me one day, as one of the boys, nicknamed Psycho, greeted us and walked up the street with a sharpened, broken metal table leg in his hand, “When that boy is locked up, the whole neighborhood is at peace. But now that he is out, all the boys have gone crazy.” The only party that did not seem to know that these two boys were responsible for most of the havoc in the complex was the police. By crimi-nalizing all of the boys, the police, it seemed, could not tell the difference between predatory criminals and innocent young people trying to live their lives. By policing and harassing youth who stepped into the public sphere looking like a “gang member” or a “drug dealer,” and not learning from the community about the small group responsible for most crimes, police allowed a few predatory criminals to reign inside the marginalized space of the apartment complex. Police failed to intervene in crime that took place on the property, as if this area were outside their purview.Police in SchoolFor all the boys in the study, negative encounters with police were not restricted to the streets. When asked “What was your first experience with police?” all the boys commented that their first encounters with police took place in or near school. In Oakland, probation and police offi-cers were stationed at or near many schools. A few of the boys attended a middle school that I visited while I shadowed them. On a few occasions, when I was invited to talk to some students about college, I noticed a police officer advising parents and students on academic matters, includ-ing courses to choose in preparation for high school, studying strategies, and career options. This example is representative of some of the many ways in which police and probation officers became involved in non-criminal-justice matters at school and in the community.For Jose, police seemed to always be part of his school experience. His first encounter happened at school when he was eight years old. “The first time was in third grade. I had set the bathroom garbage can on fire. We ran away, and they caught us and handcuffed us. . . . I was just try-ing to do something funny. Police came and arrested me and my friends. This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[58]They only had a pair of handcuffs, and they handcuffed me and my friend together. This is the first time I got arrested. I also flunked that year.” Jose was not taken to jail; instead, his mother picked him up from the cus-tody of the police office. However, his parents, his friends, and the school staff started to view him as a kid who had been arrested. Jose returned to school after the incident and remembers being treated differently by teachers and friends: “Teachers would tell me that if I kept messing up, they would have to call the cops again. I was really scared, so I tried to do good, but then [long pause] I don’t know what happened. I just started messing up anyway. . . . My friends started to respect me more, and they looked up to me. That kinda felt good. . . . That is probably why I messed up even more.”18 From fourth to sixth grade, Jose consistently failed in his academic endeavors. He spent most of his time in detention rooms and “opportunity” classes designed to house the most disruptive students at school: “I would just sit there and stare at the wall or lay my head down to rest. The teacher would give me good grades just as long as I didn’t flash [go crazy].” The school-stationed police officer regularly checked on Jose. Over time, Jose says, school began to serve as a site of punishment and control, a space where teachers, police, probation officers, and adminis-trators alike “just waited” for him “to fuck up.”Jose believed that school served as a space that systematically denied him what sociologists call a “positive rite”—the universal human need to be perceived by others in a positive light, with consideration instead of deg-radation.19 In other words, in Jose’s account, school functioned as a space where his personal need to feel acknowledged and respected was system-atically denied, and instead he was treated with indignity and disdain. In the context of juvenile crime, researchers have found that shame is an integral component of criminalization and is part of the vicious cycle that creates lifelong lawbreakers.20 Being shamed and feeling stigmatized often leads young people into crime.21 For Jose, this cycle may have begun when he was taken through the ritual of being handcuffed and walked out of school at eight years of age, an event that publicly identified him as a criminal. The stigma produced by this ritual helped to generate a self-fulfilling prophecy that shaped his ensuing relationships with teachers, police, and probation officers. Because Jose believed they were all collaborating to criminalize and punish him, he treated them with hostility, an attitude that led adults to This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[59]act punitively toward him. I noticed similar events countless times during my observations at Jose’s middle school and continuation high school.I observed Jose react to teachers, school security officers, and police with defiance, and in return they responded by intensifying their punitive treat-ment of him. One day, I asked a school security supervisor why she treated Jose so “tough.” She replied, “Listen, man, when these kids get to the point where they start talking back, you gotta regulate. You gotta make sure they know that you’re in command—no matter what it takes.” I later asked Jose what he thought about this statement. Jose was not surprised. He told me that most security guards, school police, and school officials had treated him with this attitude. In this context, Jose recalls losing interest in school by the time he started fifth grade.22 He stopped wearing a backpack, stopped actively participating in class, and eventually received an “age promotion” into middle school. Jose failed fourth and fifth grade, but the school pro-moted him because he was too old to stay in elementary school.Jose recounted being beaten by police a week after he started middle school. He was twelve years old. The same police that patrolled his neigh-borhood since he was a small child, the same officer who had refused to help him recover his family’s gallon of milk, gave him his first police beating:Sometimes, they be trying to jack me and stuff. Like they be trying to mess with us, like play around. They’ll . . . they’ll try to play around with us: “We got calls saying that you guys are doing this and that.” ’Cause sometimes we wouldn’t be doing nothing; they would just blurb us [light and siren signals of police vehicles]. One day they just got me for doing too much [messing around]. I was looking at the cop like crazy and stuck my tongue out him. He got out and whipped my ass.By sixth grade Jose began to flirt with gang life. Middle school pro-vided him with the resources to become a “wannabe,” a youth who has displayed interest in becoming part of the gang. A major reason for want-ing to join the gang, at least initially, was for protection from violence.I was . . . was by the house. . . . So some, uhh, Sureños [Southerners—rival gang members] . . .—I seen them when they were in the car—they had a gun. I was walking. I was by my house [apartment], and I see my lil’ sister in This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[60]front of the house; my older sister, she was walking on the other side. And then out of nowhere they just like started shooting. And I told my sisters to duck. I started ducking. And then I . . . I . . . I hopped over the fence, and they left. I wasn’t really scared to get shot, but I was scared for my sisters.No one was hurt that day. Jose, however, knew that, based solely on the apartment building he lived in, he had become a target for other gangs. Based on previous experience with the police, he believed they were not going to find the shooters. When officers asked him for information, he did not say a word. Jose explained that he was afraid that telling the officers would lead to the people who shot at him finding out and retaliating. Jose had good reason for these suspicions, as many young men in this study provided stories of police officers giving them information about rival gang members. I myself witnessed this process three times. During one observation, an officer arrived at the street corner where we were stand-ing. He called us over and got out of the car. He told the boys, “You know, the Scraps [derogatory name for Sureños] just ratted one of your boys out. They say that he was involved in a shooting on Friday night. Where is he?”The culture of criminalization that affects many communities of color has created a corresponding culture that forbids “snitching.” In this study, the sense that community members and homies were regularly incarcer-ated through false accusations, police “setups,” entrapment, and forced testimonies led many of the boys to declare a vow against ever provid-ing information to police, even when they were the victims. The “don’t snitch” campaign among the boys in this study was not a commitment to allow murderers to remain free; it was an attempt to avoid further crimi-nalization and unjust arrests and sentencing and to protect themselves from being “ratted out” by police. One can make sense of the perceiv-ably senseless “don’t snitch campaign” as a collective attempt to resist the overpolicing-underpolicing paradox and mass incarceration. At such a young age, Jose already had a keen sense that the police would do more harm than good with the information he provided. Meanwhile, another cast of characters provided Jose with the support denied by law enforce-ment that he felt he needed: the neighborhood gang members.The older gang members from the neighborhood acknowledged Jose for having experienced an attack on his family. They told him that they This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[61]would back him up. “Even though I was little, they was like, ‘You got a lot of heart.’ I told them, ‘Yeah,’ and they said, ‘All right then, you gotta put in work.’” For Jose, putting in work meant attacking rival gang members to avenge the attack on his family. At the time, Jose was fourteen years old and had unofficially been accepted into the gang for taking a hit from rivals. Jose went on “missions” with his homeboys to find and beat up rival gang members. He also began to smoke marijuana and to “love it.” This led to his first stint in juvenile hall.One day, an officer stopped him in front of the neighborhood liquor store, searched him, and arrested him for a ten-dollar bag of marijuana he had in his pocket. After two days in “juvy,” Jose returned to his neighbor-hood. This time, he figured that if he was going to take risks and be arrested for minor drug possession, he “might as well grind big thangs and make some money.” He attempted to become a crack-cocaine dealer.23 He had big dreams that he would become rich and buy his mother a house so that he could move away from the apartment complex. He learned how to cook up powder cocaine with baking soda to produce crack rocks. He learned how to wrap the rocks in balloons and keep them in his mouth. This way, if the police stopped him, he would swallow the rocks to hide the evidence. Jose even shadowed a group of older guys from six in the morning to three the next morning, twenty-one entire hours, just to learn how “business was handled.” Sixteen of the youths in this study had sold drugs at one point, and all these boys described making a lot of money while they sold drugs. After more probing, I realized that their notion of “lots of money” was relative. Some of them made five hundred dollars in one day. How-ever, there were also days when they only made twenty dollars. Overall, their “salaries” averaged out to less than forty dollars a day. However, their working day sometimes lasted up to twenty-one hours. In other words, it is quite possible that the majority of drug-dealing young people in Oakland make less than minimum wage, all while risking incarceration, violence, and addiction by selling drugs on the street.24 Despite all Jose’s hard work and training, on his first day selling crack, the police arrested him.I was about like at East 15th, and five-o [police] blurbed me. And . . . I was by myself before they grabbed me by my neck. And, like, they tried to make me spit out the, um, rocks. And, like, I didn’t want to spit them out. This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[62]They, like—he was holding my neck for like . . . for like twenty seconds or less. And after that, I spit them out myself. ’Cause, I thought he was gonna choke me, hard, harder.The police arrested Jose and placed him in a gang database, CalGang, a statewide documentation system that officers use to maintain informa-tion on people they deem gang members.25 I later verified that Jose was in the database when he and I were stopped and they conducted a search on our records. One of the officers said to another, “Yeah, he’s in the database.” He turned to Jose and, referring to his nickname, “Topo,” said, “Tapo, Tipo, Taco? What is your nickname?” Jose ignored him, knowing that he was being mocked. The officer turned to me and told me, “Jose is a crazy little dude. He’s been a player ever since he was little, . . . no trouble, but we got him in the gang database just in case.”26 Being placed on the gang database can add five, ten, fifteen, and even twenty-five years to a felony sentence, since under the 1988 Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act, a prosecutor can charge a youth for committing a crime to further a gang’s criminal activity. Six of the boys in this study were eventually charged with gang enhancements.Soon after I met Jose and interviewed him about his life story, he was arrested again. This time the police spotted him in the middle of a street fight and found a knife on him. Jose explained that while he was fight-ing, his opponent pulled out a knife, and he knocked the knife out of the other kid’s hand and grabbed it, with no intention of using it. He claimed that he had the knife on him for a long time before the police arrived, just trying to keep it off the street. Jose spent three weeks in juvenile hall fol-lowing this arrest.A few months later, Jose was arrested again for stealing a bicycle. The officer arrested him even though Jose did not have the bicycle in his pos-session. According to Jose, he knew the group of Black youths who had stolen the bicycle, but he did not want to “snitch” on them. When the judge told Jose that he was not going to lock him up but that he would have to follow a strict program with his probation officer, Jose thought that he might get help and turn his life around. His main concern was to stay away from the people he associated with on the street, because he wanted to escape the pressures to prove himself through violence and criminality:This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[63]I just wanted to start doing better, so I told my probation officer to help me. He said that I had to stay away from all those crazy kids I hung around with. He also told me that if I got caught with them, I would go back to jail. He told me to tell them that I would go to jail if I talked to them, but they didn’t believe me. . . . I think that for Mr. Bryan [his probation officer] it is easy to tell me to change, but I hella try and he doesn’t see what happens when I try.At first glance, one might believe that Jose was a violent, drug-pushing thief. However, when we take a closer look at Jose’s understanding of his environment, we uncover the process by which Jose was criminalized; his interactions with authority figures set part of the stage on which he per-formed illicit activity, and this illicit activity generated further punitive treatment. Jose’s criminal trajectory may have been instrumentally deter-mined by his negative interactions with agents of social control.Tyrell Gets MarkedEventually, Jose and Tyrell became marked as criminals. When Tyrell was fourteen, he was caught with an ounce of marijuana and spent three weeks in juvenile hall. When he returned home after release, his father attempted to beat him. Tyrell fought back, wrestling his father to the ground. After the fight, his father disregarded him, saying that if Tyrell thought he was a man, he should take care of himself. He refused to speak to Tyrell for weeks at a time, and, as a consequence, their relationship more or less shifted to that of roommates: “I do my own thing, and he does his own thing. He can’t say shit to me anymore, and I don’t trip off of him.”The combination of stigma at school, harassment from police on the street, and Tyrell’s resentment of his defunct relationship with his father may have led him to develop the attitude to “not give a fuck.” In Tyrell’s frame of reference, the implications of breaking the law were imposed on him daily. In such situations, getting incarcerated might begin to feel like a viable option. The irony of Tyrell’s mentality was that the stress of being criminalized in the neighborhood led him to believe that juvenile hall might serve as an escape. In some sense, he was willing to trade one puni-tive community for another: “In juvy,” Tyrell explained, “at least if I fol-low the rules, I’ll be left alone.”27 When incarcerated, Tyrell could predict This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[64]when he would be treated punitively: if he broke the rules. On the street, however, even if he followed the rules, he felt he would still be punished. For Tyrell and many of the boys, detention facilities became preferred social contexts because they provided structure, discipline, and predict-ability—rare attributes in the punitive context of the streets. Although the boys did not want to be incarcerated, detention facilities were the only spaces where they felt that they could predict cause and effect. Tyrell described it this way: “If I do my program, then I know I will be straight [good]. . . . If I don’t follow directions, then I’ll be stuck.” We can make sense of why many young people who decide to violate their probation or parole do so, to seek shelter from a punitive social order, a youth control complex, that to many is worse than being incarcerated.Hypercriminalization creates conditions in which young people actually seek more predictable, albeit more restrictive, forms of punish-ment. Many of the boys talked about liking the structure of incarceration because it dictated a clear set of rules. In the community, police, proba-tion officers, schools, businesses, and families were perceived as unpre-dictable; the youths reported frustration with not knowing when their teachers, parents, or police would criminalize them.Compelled to become a man on his own, to act and maneuver as an adult, and to take responsibility for himself, Tyrell faced the wrath of peer violence and police oppression. By the time he was fifteen, Tyrell became a bona-fide target for police. The police could pick him out easily because of his height, and they harassed him every time they saw him: “Man, they wouldn’t stop messing with me. One day I pushed a cop, and he fell. They grabbed me and whooped my ass. They beat me so bad that they let me go. They felt bad for me. I have a scar here and here [he points to two small scars on his scalp and forehead].” Instead of dealing drugs in fear of being arrested again, Tyrell chose a different specialization. He went to the drug dealers in the neighborhood and offered to collect from people who owed them money. The drug dealers began paying him to recover debts. With this work Tyrell became extremely violent, as he recovered amounts owed that ranged from ten to five hundred dollars:I had to send the message that I was not fucking around, so I ran into a crack head that owed my nigga [friend] some money. I grabbed his ass and This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[65]whooped him so hard he’s been limping ever since. . . . That was all I had to do. Most of the time people paid me what they owed. One day, though, I had to whoop some fool’s ass. I hit him on the leg with a golf club, so they charged me with aggravated assault and assault with a deadly weapon, but they dropped the deadly weapon charge. I still did three months in juvy.At sixteen, Tyrell was placed on two years’ probation. He was also placed on electronic monitoring (EM) as a condition of his release. EM is a program that probation officers use to keep track of juvenile offenders. A black, square-shaped device, about the size of a large cellular phone, is strapped around the youth’s ankle. Whenever Tyrell went over a few hundred feet from his house, the device would send a message to his pro-bation officer. The probation officer then could arrest him for violating probation. In the beginning, Tyrell was arrested and held for two days for going outside his area limit. Afterward, however, he got the hang of the monitoring device and completed his six-month program:I did it, but it was hecka hard. I couldn’t leave home, and then that shit started itching me all the time. [He shows me his leg, scarred from the scratching.] My boys thought that shit was tight [appealing], but I told them it wasn’t cool at all. They would come visit me and kick it at my house, since I couldn’t go anywhere. We set up shop [a hangout space] there and just chilled there until they let me off.Tyrell and his friends were confined to a small apartment because of his requirement to remain at home. The consequence of the electronic monitoring device was that it created a new “kick-it spot” for the boys in Tyrell’s apartment building. This new hangout concentrated a large group of delinquent boys in a private space where they became invisible. The possibility of their receiving support or services from adults in the public sphere who wanted to help them was now diminished. Yet Tyrell and his friends believed this to be a safe haven from the criminalizing interactions they endured in the public sphere: suspicion in stores, auto-matic searches by police and probation officers, denial of employment for having a criminal record, and stigma imposed by school authorities and other adults.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[66]Jose Internalizes ViolenceOne day I caught up with Jose at his apartment. When I arrived, his mother told me that he had taken off to the Indoor Flea Market, a pop-ular warehouse with twenty or so booths, where residents found cheap clothing, expensive tennis shoes, and jewelry. I drove down International to go look for Jose. Halfway to the “Indoor,” I noticed Jose standing at the corner of International Boulevard and High Street, one of the busi-est intersections in Oakland. I parked my car and walked over to Jose. Smacking meat out of his teeth, Jose told me he stopped there to get a taco from his favorite truck, El Taco Zamorano. We sat on a cement divider in front of All Mufflers, a mechanic shop situated on the corner. The hot yellow color of the square concrete building served as a canvas for Black and Latino bodies, painting a picture of local residents as they stood waiting for the bus to make their way through town. An old, white pickup truck, with an open hood and a Latino mechanic hunched over the engine trying to fix it, sat adjacent to us.I started asking Jose about his week. He seemed distracted. He looked around and ignored my questions. And then it dawned on me: we were in the heart of rival gang territory. As I started asking him another ques-tion, he interrupted me and said, “Hold up, hold up, man!” I turned in the direction he was looking and noticed another young man walking toward us. Jose ran up to him and, without warning, punched him in the face and knocked him down. When he hit the ground, Jose started kicking him in the stomach. I yelled at Jose, “Get off!” but he did not listen. The young man on the ground looked at me with despair, his head leaning on the concrete. I wrapped my arms around Jose and pulled him back. He force-fully shook me off and went back to kick his rival. I rolled my wrists into the kid’s XXL-size white T-shirt and yanked him up from the ground and away from Jose, who followed us, shouting, “You little bitch! . . . Punk-ass coward!” I told Jose to go home, and I drove the beaten kid home. The boy refused to answer any more questions after telling me, “I’m okay.”I found Jose a few days later and asked him about the assault. He told me that the other kid, Puppet, a member of a rival gang, 37th Street, lived in Jose’s neighborhood. Jose and the rest of his gang were upset about this and were determined to drive Puppet out of their neighborhood. Every This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[67]time Jose or his friends saw Puppet, they immediately attacked him. Jose was also upset because Puppet had, in his view, caused him to go to jail.Like, we were on International [Boulevard], and we seen Puppet. I chased him on a bike and pulled him off the bike. And, uh, he started running; he got away. I guess the Black dudes that kick it at the corner, they took his bike. And I got, like, at the park, ’cause I ran to the park because I seen a lotta po-police! So I ran to the park, and they got me at the park for rob-bery, me and another homey.Jose served two weeks in juvenile hall and afterward was sent to a group home (a reform program managed from a private residence) for six months. Some of the youth at the group home did not like him, and Jose made more enemies during his stay there. Jose described getting into a fight with two youths from San Francisco because they picked on him.So I’m not no punk. I just told them I went to the garage, and they told me it was gonna be a one-on-one [fight]. And I was winning, so they jumped me. . . . The people from the group home, they called the police. They was like, “You gonna . . . you gonna do a couple months in the hall.” This is just a punishment. I didn’t want to do that. So I just grabbed my stuff, and I left. And it’s a regular house; you can just leave from the front door. So I just grabbed my stuff, and I ran out. And I got caught a month later.Jose served two months in juvenile hall and then was sent to another group home. He ran away once more. I checked on Jose a few weeks later. His mother told me he’d been arrested and was facing six months in the California Youth Authority (the state prison for minors) for carrying an unloaded gun.Jose’s mother, Rosario, was in despair. She was an undocumented, single mother of two, Jose and his thirteen-year-old sister, Rosa. Rosa-rio worked as a maid in Walnut Creek, an affluent suburb on the other side of the hill from Oakland. She was paid sixty dollars a day, working ten- to twelve-hour shifts. Her employer officially paid her as a part-time worker but pressured her to work more hours for no pay. She left home at six in the morning, and after taking a BART train and two buses—a This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[68]three-hour commute in all—she arrived at work at nine. By the time she returned home, it was eight o’clock at night. Rosario had received wel-fare to help her with the rent. However, after being pressured to obtain a job by her social worker at the welfare office, she took the house-clean-ing job. The family continued to struggle financially, despite Rosario’s employment. Rosario told me that she made less money when working than when she was receiving welfare. She was stressed because she could no longer be there to watch over her children. During my observations at the apartment complex, I often found Rosa sitting on the steps talk-ing to a nineteen-year-old gang member.28 Rosario’s absence exposed Rosa and Jose, even more, to the vulnerabilities and vices of the streets. Punished and abandoned by the welfare state for being poor, Rosa was forced to work and abandon her own children, leaving them vulnerable to the violence of the streets and criminalization of the state (and civil society).I went to Jose’s court date with Rosario. The judge made it clear to Jose that if the gun had been loaded, he would have sent him to be tried as an adult, where he would face a minimum of five years in prison. The judge said to Jose, “You are living on the brink of self-destruction. This is prob-ably your last chance in life. If you don’t follow your program at camp, and I see you in here again, I will make sure you never get out again. You understand?” Jose nodded and looked down. He looked ashamed and scared. After the judge’s statement, Jose turned and looked at his mother and me with a slight smile, celebrating the fact that his fear of being sent to adult court did not materialize.Jose’s Life at Age SeventeenBy age seventeen, Jose had served time at Camp Sweeney, an Alameda County juvenile justice facility which detained young offenders during the week and attempted to provide them with a structured, camp-style program that included academic courses, counseling, and health-aware-ness workshops. Despite Camp Sweeney’s ideal of rehabilitating nonvio-lent criminals, Jose understood it this way: as a place where they “put all the crazy fools together and makes us fight or plot some shit that will get us in hella even more trouble.”This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[69]Jose was allowed to leave the camp on weekends and return to his fam-ily, as long as he did not leave home. When I visited him over the week-end, Jose told me he felt ashamed of himself. He said that he wanted to change but did not know how. “Being locked up, even at camp,” he explained, “was making me have to do crazy shit to put my name out [to gain a reputation] even more.” Jose felt that he had to prove himself to his peers at camp or become a victim. If he did not act tough and get into fights, he might be seen as a punk and face attacks from the rest of his camp mates. Three of the boys in this study had been to this same camp. They all reported that the guards at camp did not protect them from vic-timization, that the guards even encouraged a culture of street justice in which young men who were victimized had to learn, as Jose described one of the guards saying, to “be a grown man and defend yourself.”Once released, Jose inhabited the same streets; this time, however, he claimed to have an understanding of his environment. He now articu-lated a deep desire to change his life around, whereas in the past, he saw his environment only as a place in which to prove his manhood. But the streets were not forgiving, and Jose had to pretend that he was still street oriented and that he was willing to continue to put in work: “If I go out there and pretend to be someone else, they [friends and peers] won’t look at me the same way. They will see weakness in me and try to take advan-tage. That’s why its hella hard to change.” I followed Jose as he attempted to find support for his endeavor to change, and I witnessed as school and community centers were unable to provide him the support he believed he needed: help looking for a job, a mentoring program, and somewhere to hang out where he did not have to feel forced to prove himself.Jose’s probation officer served as the only possible source of support for change. Mr. Bryan talked to Jose repeatedly about finding a non-violent way to manage conflict and told him that only “silly little punks” folded to the pressure of peers. According to Jose, Mr. Bryan expected positive behavior from him regardless of the situation he was in. “What if I get messed with, and other kids try to beat me up?” Jose asked. “You just tell them that your PO is gonna kick your and their ass,” Mr. Bryan responded. Jose realized that this kind of response was unrealistic and that it did not help him. Not having a realistic and viable alternative to resolving conflict on the street, Jose defaulted to the only skills he This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[70]believed were proven to work in the past in managing conflict: postur-ing as if he was ready to commit violence and “flash” in response to any threats posed by peers. Although Jose reasoned that he no longer wanted to participate in this ritual, the streets reminded him that following the “code of the street,” despite its many drawbacks, was the only problem-solving and survival strategy available to him. For many of the boys in this study, using the “code of the street” was like flipping a coin. Some-times their gamble paid off, and the code would protect them and make them feel protected. Other times, the wrong side of the coin appeared, and their confrontational demeanor would render them victims.Many of the young people in this study said that they expected proba-tion and police officers to help them find alternative ways of coping with violence but that these adults did not realize their advice had little practi-cal application on the street, as Mr. Bryan’s perspective on Jose suggested: “Jose is a good kid, but he folds to peer pressure really easy. As soon as one of his friends tells him to do something, he does it. He just has to be strong and tell his little friends that he is not messing with negativity any-more. He needs to be responsible for himself and show his friends that he can be a man and not fold to peer pressure.” When I asked Jose about peer pressure, he told me that it had an influence but that he was his “own man.” He articulated a desire to change yet acknowledged that his friends would be an obstacle. I asked him, “What would you do if you had all the resources you needed to change?” He replied,If I could, I would finish my diploma and go to community college and get some kind of certificate to work on cars. I want to own my own shop one day. I am already good with cars, and I think I would be a good mechanic. But I don’t know, I still got a long ways to go. . . . Maybe a lawyer, maybe helping the community, those in my position now or those who will be in my position. People who get in trouble, I like to help them. I wouldn’t be doing half of the shit I’m doing now, if I had a better environment. . . . I think I need a program that comes to me, you know, like, you—like, people that call you and come over and check up on you. Sometimes I don’t have money to take the bus to go to a program, or the programs they have are whack [inadequate or boring]. You know, like, “Don’t do drugs—this is your brain on drugs—just say no” type of shit.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[71]The disjuncture between Jose’s expectations of a supportive, nurturing, resource-savvy probation officer and his negative interactions with his probation officer’s unrealistic expectations of him resulted in a belief that resources to change were not available, despite his aspiration to do so.To make matters worse, Jose’s commentary on wanting to change and his actions sometimes did not correspond with one another. For exam-ple, one afternoon Jose told me that he would no longer hang out with his homies; later that night, he called a few of his friends to visit him at his house, despite being prohibited to hang out with them, according to the terms of his probation. Sociologist Elliot Liebow calls the differ-ence between what people say and what they do a “half-truth.”29 Jose’s half-truth was this articulation of wanting to change but acting in ways that would limit his ability to do so. I don’t believe that Jose was attempt-ing to “play the system” when he began to articulate that he was ready to change. Instead, Jose had developed an illusion of change in which he thought that wanting to change would translate into real change. Jose’s belief in change did not necessarily mean that he would receive the nec-essary resources—help with job applications, help reenrolling in school, mentoring, counseling, and so on—to change his life around.Sociologist Alice Goffman argues that young, Black, male felons “maintain self respect in the face of failure” by telling “half-truths,” by using their wanted status as an excuse not to provide for their families or show responsibility: “Being wanted serves as an excuse for a variety of unfulfilled obligations and expectations.”30 I did not find this to be true with the boys in my study, even when they were “on the run.” The boys in my study did not blame the system to maintain self-respect or to create excuses for their unfulfilled obligations and expectations. These boys were more than willing to confess that they had “fucked up,” that they were responsible for their social conditions. While the boys believed that the police beatings, excessive sentences, harassment, and heavy sur-veillance were unjust, they also acknowledged that they had made some wrong choices and that they were accountable for not completing school, not providing for their children (six of the boys were fathers), or not hav-ing a job. In an era of “personal responsibility” when schools, police, and community members could not guarantee the boys success, nurturing, or security, the one thing that these agencies of social control could do This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[72]was to inculcate in the boys a sense of self-blame. The boys were taught that poverty, victimization, criminalization, and neglect were products of their own actions. The boys internalized these messages, and in turn they all reported feeling personally responsible for their plight.Code of the Street, Code of the StateSchools, police, and probation officers helped to perpetuate the code of the street. They did so either by assuming that all the boys were actively engaged in criminal and violent activity or by providing the boys little choice but to engage in the code. In refusing to protect residents, and in encouraging young men to take care of themselves, authority figures, including police and probation officers, explicitly encouraged young men to engage in the code. In Oakland, police officers encouraged young men to apply the code of the street in two main ways. First, officers purposely refused to provide protection. Second, the police diverted resources to policing youths who were easy targets in the public sphere and often ignored predatory criminal activity that happened right below the sur-face, in areas that they had chosen not to police, such as apartment com-plexes, parks, and “death alleys” that they might have perceived as danger-ous. Police operated under a demographic rather than a criminological model of threat. In doing so, they missed countless opportunities to pro-tect innocent people from being victimized.Many events in this study demonstrated that police were involved in magnifying the code of the street. Another example is Slick, who, like Jose, reported that police encouraged residents to take justice into their own hands. Slick was brutally attacked by a group of gang members dur-ing the time when he became a “wannabe.” When the police showed up to conduct an investigation, Slick and his friends told the officer the name of the gang members who attacked them: “The pigs told us where we could find them. They told us they had just seen them hanging out at the corner of 9th and e-one-four (East 14th). They said to us, ‘You gotta do what you gotta do.’ So we did.”The code of the street allowed the police to justify harassment and arrest, schools to punish and suspend students for defiance, and com-munity members to fear young people. In responding to the code of the This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Labeling Hype[73]street, authority figures in Oakland created a labeling hype and culture of punishment that criminalized young people’s everyday style and pursuit of happiness, even when these did not involve breaking the law. I found that it was not only important to understand how the boys used the code of the street but also to understand how the community responded to young people who were associated with the code of the street. Seeing how others responded to the code of the street allowed me to understand how institutions such as the criminal justice system and schools were also responsible for creating a social order, a code of conduct that inculcated criminality and victimization among marginalized youths.31 By operat-ing in the belief that the code of the street was rampant among marginal-ized youths, despite the fact that a minority of these youths lived by this code, institutions created a social order that managed every young person it encountered as a threat who followed a code that victimized others. Alford Young argues that social scientists have focused too much of their attention on marginalized black men’s behaviors on the streets.32 This has enabled schools, law enforcement, and policy makers to treat marginal-ized young black men as if the streets determine all of their codes of con-duct and worldviews. The boys in this study believed that some agents of social control, the family, school administrators, and police, interacted with them as if at any given moment they would engage in crime or vio-lence. As the boys came of age, they experienced being treated as crimi-nal risks in need of constant, ubiquitous surveillance and control across social contexts.This content downloaded from 157.242.56.93 on Sat, 20 May 2023 01:26:30 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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