Chapter one of the book opens with an in-depth explanation of the methods and the inspiration behind the study. Rios goes into great detail of how he recruited the boys for the study and proves additional information about their history with the criminal justice system. However, most the chapter focuses on the patterns of punishment that are observed in Oakland that the boys experienced on a routine basis. The chapter covers the police brutality and negativity on the streets that leads to continuous victimization. Rios records several instances where the boys in the study encounter negative interactions with individuals involved in the criminal justice system like the officers that patrol the streets, the parole officers that criticize and label the boys as deviants, and the juvenile system that threaten and harass the boys. Such …show more content…
Many of the boys pretended that negative interactions and stereotyping did not affect them, but their bravo personas only masked the fear inside. Fear made the boys feel weaker and less masculine, so they would deviate from social norms to regain respect and dignity among their peers and for themselves. Routine patterns of punishment eventually lead the boys to develop an altered view of thoughts, beliefs, and ways of behaving in order to survive the tough life set them. Chapter two concentrates on the history of Oakland, incarceration rates, youth systems of control, and the boy’s resistance to punishment and brutalization. The Oakland ghetto consists of a multiracial community, predominantly African-American and Latino, that are equally targeted and brutalized by police
Getting Ghost – Culture and Ethnographic Essay The book Getting Ghost, by Luke Bergmann, recounts the stories of two adolescent African-American males, Dude Freeman, and Rodney Phelps, attending a juvenile detention facility in the city of Detroit, USA. Detroit, one of the poorest cities in the United States has one third of its residents living in poverty. Its crime rates are high, and illegal drugs are available in many poor areas. In the western and eastern suburbs the ethnic majority is African-American, these suburbs are low income, and as a result drug dealing on the streets is carried out by the adolescent African-American males (Getting Ghost Background Sheet 2015:1).
Hubner’s intentions with this study and Last Chance in Texas is to allow others that read the book to recognize the meaning behind a juvenile’s criminal actions. This could be a guide book for a potential probation officer to understand unique ways for them to treat their offender with the motive to not focus on punishment. The potential probation officer and use the ideas of the criminal finding a way to put himself in the victim’s shoes and understand how being a criminal harms more than just the person that was intended to be hurt. The audience of this book varies. The book was poorly written without as much detail, so the stories written down could not have a false accusation that the stories documented from the students in this book
Kids in the most disadvantaged neighborhood, with low family resources, bad schools, and neighborhoods characterized by violence are the ones who are being punished unfairly and are not given second chances. This is because of the discrimination and the bias of the criminal justice system against poor African-American communities, which represent a concentrated disadvantage in that case. Moreover it affirms the theory that the poor are more likely to get to prison because there is a bias in arrest such as the neighborhood social class that affects the presence of the police and their arrests. In that case 6th street is considered a neighborhood that represents communities that are disadvantaged, and therefore the presence of police is greater than necessary. Instead of having the resources from outside to ameliorate the conditions of the neighborhood and improve schools or academic institutions, the efforts and resources are being invested in the war against crimes, but without giving an alternative solution for their
The author based his investigation on criminologists, ethnographers and anthropologists criteria to argument his outcomes which add a solid framework to the entire project. I think the book suggests that there is a lot to do and it’s time to change unsuccessful methods. Despite of some critics, I think “Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys” is an obligatory reading to all people who really want to understand the whys and hows of most of young men who are labeled as criminals and live in marginal neighborhoods. This material also has the merit of describing the way these youths have to coexist with a lot of disadvantages to make a change and get a positive progress in their
In the book “Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City” written by Dr. Elijah Anderson, the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University, brings to light the different issues that are regular in the city today. The street codes have a huge influence on the activities and conduct of numerous young people in the inner city or “hood”. In the hood, Anderson demonstrates that there are numerous social disasters like high rates of unemployment, and teen pregnancy. The principle power contributing to these street codes, according to Anderson, is racism; though that kind of behavior is accelerated by the existing economic and political commands in the city (Anderson 34). The “Code of the Street”
Urban ethnography, a systematic method used to examine culture developing in everyday life, let Rios discern the difficult aspects, unfortunate circumstances, and social relations of the young men’s lives. Victor Rios observed, shadowed, and interviewed delinquent inner-city youth males to answer his question of the effect of the punishment on the boys. As Rio studied the life of these males he discovered a youth control complex where punishment was present in everyday social life, and the behavior of these marginalized young men were criminalized, pointing them to incarceration, disgrace, and exclusion. Racialization, harassment, punishment, surveillance, and detention by all adult figures were all pieces of the pattern of the social order in Oakland that shaped the way the young men created worldviews about themselves and the deeply rooted social stances in their community. Rios found social incapacitation present upon these marginalized males.
United States: Greenhaven Publishing. The book provides various opposing viewpoints regarding the cause of juvenile crime and how the criminal justice system should treat juvenile offenders. Each argument highlights the main risk factors for juvenile crime. For example, gang plays a large part of juvenile violence.
Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a PEN Award recipient for his nonfiction work, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court. His training and experiences reflect No Matter How Loud I Shout because he has immersed himself in the court system of California and spent one year in the justice system in Los Angeles, Inglewood, and Pomona, California, which gave him insight into the juvenile system and the necessary skills and resources to construct this book. Along with this book, Humes has written thirteen other nonfiction books. They range from discussing the G.I. Bill to looking at American high schools. Humes writes about the American people and the effects of social life and the government.
During his time studying these boys, he found that most cases of conflict were resolved without the use of weapon(s), but rather with “harsh conversation”. This observation highly contradicts the typical view of gang members who are commonly stereotyped by their local community and justice system in Oakland. Rios describes how the boys “Conversations often involved references to guns as analogies for resolving conflict and demonstrating manhood”. The fact that most conflicts are dealt with in non-violent ways, highlights the negative role
When it comes to the novel, Lord of the Flies, some of us will readily agree that the boys’ immoral and savage acts exposed at the end of the novel, demonstrates the evil that lives naturally within humankind. Where this agreement usually ends, however, is on the question of was the cause for the boys’ immoral and savage conducts a biological or an environmental factor. Whereas some are convinced that biological factors are to blame, others maintain that the situation or the environment is to blame for their behavior. In my own view, both factors are to blame for the boys’ immoral and savage behavior, but the environment the boys’ where force to live had the most impact on their actions. Being deserted on an unknown island can cause any individual to experience a variety of emotions all at once; from fear, to anger, and then excitement.
The media and the public do not know what motivates these boys to commit such act and it is easier to assume that they are “savages” as their characters than to find alternative reasons. Boys from their ethnic background have a reputation for crime in New York City. In this case, the people fail to find alternative reasons and they stick to their first perception of the situation. As a result, they gave a group of teenage boys punishment for crimes they did not commit.
The boys sought for this experiment were already delinquent, and as noted this was a case study, these were unique individuals and as such the findings cannot be generalized to the larger population of the United States, California or even Oakland. Another fact that must be noted is that the author utilized snowball sampling, the author went to community organizations and asked to be connected to ‘at risk’ kids, and when he established communication with some of the young men, he asked them to refer him to other youths in similar situations. The author also makes note of the fact that his own experiences as a child may have had a bias on his
Annotated Bibliography Books Dudley, William, et al., editors. Police Brutality. D.L. Bender, 1991. • Police Brutality gives information on how police brutality is a widespread issue in the United States and explains different controversies and cases that relate to police brutality. • The editors of this book include activists and nonfiction authors who provide reliable information on what happened during different incidences of police brutality and the viewpoints and controversies that come with it.
Synthesis Research Paper Everyday growing up as a young black male we have a target on our back. Society was set out for black males not to succeed in life. I would always hear my dad talk about how police in his younger days would roam around the town looking for people to arrest or get into an altercation with. As a young boy growing up I couldn’t believe some of the things he said was happening. However as I got older I would frequently hear about someone getting killed by the police force.
An occurrence observed by the population of Los Angeles, California conveys the existence of racism and police brutality. According to The Polls-Trends: Racial Differences in Attitudes Toward the Police, “…three quarters of blacks, but only 38 percent of whites, continued to view police brutality as a common occurrence” (Tuch and Weitzer