Black And Latino Boys Book Report

The book "Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys" is written by Victor M. Rios who was a former gang member in his hometown and later turned his life around. He went to Berkeley and earn a doctorate in sociology. This book explores how youth of color are profiled, disciplined, and criminalized by authorities even they have not committed any crimes and how it can cause a harmful consequence for the young man and their community in Oakland, California. They are mostly from working class and not involved in the crime, but their everyday behaviors are systematically treated as potential criminal action and they are made to feel outcast, shamed, and lack of trust before some of them enter the criminal justice system. The goal is to

The audience is to towards everyone such as the young boys of color who can relate to the book and the authorities who mistreat them. Ethnographic research methods between forty Black and Latino boys aged 14-18 in Oakland are used in this book. All of the participants had been arrested, or were socially linked with others had been arrested, or were on probation. Rios collected data by carrying on participant observations, interviews, focus group, and fieldwork. In the inner cities, most of the young men's parents still try to infuse their children with positive thinking, and all of the young men were originally eager to go to college or learn a skill and have a normal life. However, many of those people are in extreme poverty so that they are lack of enough resources on family and school. Also their communities limited their educational and career chances. They are living in a difficult life with intense policing and dense crime. Numerous young men had to cope with the problems and shame related to family members' drug issues and incarceration. And all of them believed their chances of also being incarcerated were

But when I used to study in Glendale, my ESL teacher had biases towards Chinese students. After making the same mistake, she will be tolerant to other students, but very strict and impatient with Chinese students. And she sometimes deliberately makes things difficult for Chinese students or openly criticizing China. I consider the descriptions in Oakland can resemble this past experience of mine. Because Chinese students were also undergoing the unfair treatment and did not receive approval or feel acknowledged by the teacher. Fortunately, I am not encountering different treatments now. In school the teacher treated me equally just like other students, clerks are very friendly and nice to me without discrimination in the stores or coffee shop, and the police officers will help me if I am lost or get caught in some trouble. I think the reason might be I am living in San Gabriel where has a lot of Chinese people. So Americans have already gotten used to the massive population of Chinese. Moreover, Asian people are regarded as timid and weak, so the police normally would not think we are related to crime. The author might not provide an entirely objective view of Oakland's population. He gives us facts that Oakland has large black and Latino communities which mostly are poor and from working class and strict system of policing and surveillance. And it is his hometown, where he grew