Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys - PDF

4 The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions No public safety officer shall be prohibited from seeking election to, or serving as a member of, the governing board of a school district. —California Government Code, “Police Officers Bill of Rights,” 1977 Copyright © 2011. New York Un...

4 The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions No public safety officer shall be prohibited from seeking election to, or serving as a member of, the governing board of a school district. —California Government Code, “Police Officers Bill of Rights,” 1977 Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating. —Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1977 I drove to Spider’s house late one afternoon after a long day of discussing inequality with urban sociologists at the University of California, Berkeley. Some claimed to have found answers to the problematic questions they asked: “Why do African Americans commit disproportionate crime?” “Why does the inner city produce a culture of violence?” and “Why do immigrants become involved in gangs?” As these, primarily White, male, and middle-class, graduate students and faculty continued to dissect the ghetto from the comfort of the university, it dawned on me that I had to hit the streets and catch up with Spider, who had recently been stabbed. While I would be asking Spider about violence and gangs, an equally pressing topic, in his mind, was that of criminalization and [ 74 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions police misconduct. I knew I had a short window before Spider decided to leave his house. I grabbed my backpack, ran to my car, and drove to his house. As I left Berkeley, majestic oak and redwood trees faded from my rearview mirror, replaced by old cars, dilapidated Victorians, and track houses that had been turned into multiple apartments by slumlords. So far, from youth accounts and my observations, I had discovered that school personnel, police officers, and other adults in the community had created an environment that made these young people feel criminalized from a young age. Although I had encountered a few racist cops and even a few racist teachers, I knew that most people in the community were well intentioned and had a genuine interest in the well-being of boys. How was it possible that all the young men whom I followed believed wholeheartedly that most adults in the community worked to ubiquitously punish them? In the minds of these young men, the community had conspired to impose detrimental sanctions on them. My observations led me to uncover a complex process by which even well-intentioned adults participated in the criminalization of the boys. Some people in the community did believe that the boys were irreparable criminals and needed to be locked away. But others, those who cared dearly for these boys, did not conspire to criminalize them. Instead, these caring adults were caught up in a system of imposing punitive social control, which influenced their actions despite their having a genuine interest in the well-being of the boys. Criminologist David Garland reminds us that “punishment does not just restrain or discipline ‘society’—punishment helps create it.” He contends that punishment is one of the many institutions which helps construct and support the social world by producing the shared categories and authoritative classifications through which individuals understand each other and themselves.1 I use Garland’s analysis of punishment as an institution to understand the role that criminalization, as a form of punishment, plays in the lives of the boys in this study. Garland argues, “Like all social institutions, punishment interacts with its environment, forming part of the mutually constructing configuration of elements which make up the social world.”2 If Garland is correct, the workings of punitive social control set the stage for the development of specific meaning-making and cultural practices among youths who encounter criminalization. Their subjectivities are partially constructed by punishment. But young [ 75 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions people also have agency and develop systems of interaction and resistance to cope with these patterns of punishment and to create an alternative world, an escape from their punitive reality. Labor historian Robin Kelley argues that young people become involved in “play”—the seeking of personal enjoyment despite their detrimental circumstances. Social scientists, according to Kelley, have confused this “play” for a form of social disorder: “The growing numbers of young brown bodies engaged in ‘play’ rather than work (from street-corner bantering, to ‘mailing’ [hanging out at shopping malls], to basketball) have contributed to popular constructions of the ‘underclass’ as a threat and shaped urban police practices. The invention of terms such as wilding, as Houston Baker points out, reveal a discourse of black male youth out of control, rampaging teenagers free of the disciplinary structures of school, work, and prison.”3 In 2010, groups of Black youths in Philadelphia were placed in the national media spotlight when the city called in the FBI, made student transportation passes invalid after 4 p.m., and implemented a policy to cite parents when their children broke curfew laws. This crackdown occurred in response to “flash mobs,” large numbers of people who gather after being organized through text messaging.4 Although the majority of these gatherings did not involve delinquency, a few events, where violence and vandalism took place, led to the criminalization of young Black people gathering in groups in downtown Philadelphia. These flash mobs can be analyzed as creative responses to social isolation and a lack of recreation spaces. According to Kelley and consistent with my findings, marginalized young people’s “play” has become criminalized. Criminalizing the Victim I pulled up to Spider’s house, a two-story Victorian. The house looked as if it had not been maintained since it was first built in the early 1900s. Bare, splintered wood protruded through the flaking khaki paint. The gutterless roof had allowed rainwater to seep through the wooden paneling on the house, creating warps and cracks on the surface as if an earthquake had shaken the house from its foundation and dragged it from its original location. His mother rented a one-bedroom apartment conversion in the rear of the house. The side of the house had a driveway that had been [ 76 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions fenced off. This is where Spider kept two dogs he owned, a red-nose pit bull and a small mutt. Both dogs looked malnourished, with their ribs visibly showing and their stomachs tucked deep into their hind legs. I knocked on Slick’s metal gate door. After a few knocks, Slick answered the door. “Wassup, Vic?” “Wassup, Slick?” I replied. I had not seen him in two weeks, and the last time I saw him he was in a hospital bed. Spider was fifteen years young when he was brutally attacked by gang members on a night when he sat on his front door steps talking with friends. I was kicking it in front of my house with some homies and stuff, and then a few of them were wearing red. And they thought we were claiming [members of a gang]. And they rolled by and passed once and came a second time. And we was fighting. And I was running by myself, and my brother went that way [pointing to the right]. Then I came down this way [pointing to the left], and they caught me. And they just shanked [stabbed] me. They shanked me four in the stomach, one in the chest, and eight in the leg. They were like twenty-five years old. . . . You don’t feel nothing, but then, after, I just blacked out and woke up at the hospital. My mom came, and I told her I was OK and blacked out. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Spider nearly died. He was hospitalized for three weeks. The detectives who investigated his case paid him a visit a few hours after the incident: When I woke up, that’s when they came, the detectives I mean. Molina [the detective investigating his case] and shit came to the hospital. And they tried to see if it was Sureños that stabbed me and tried to label me as a Norteño [rival gang to Sureños]. No! But I am not Norteño, I don’t gang bang, but when I was there, they tried to make me say that I was Norteño and stuff. I couldn’t remember who stabbed me. I just know it was Sureños ’cause they kept yelling MS [Mara Salvatrucha, the name of another gang]. Yeah, and, you know, you gotta make a police report and shit. But they arrested a juvenile, and then they tried to make me testify, but I didn’t want to go to court. I already know they didn’t got the dudes that got me ’cause those dudes were grown men and stuff. And I wanted to be left alone. And then that’s why we dropped the charges, and all that. And then the DA wanted me to go to court. [ 77 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions After this near-death experience, Spider was registered by the Oakland police as an active gang member. Prior to this event, he had never been arrested or registered by police as a gang member. During his stay at the hospital, one of the gang detectives asked his mother for his personal information and asked her how long he had been in the gang. His mother insisted that he was not in the gang. The officer told her, “That’s the reason your son got stabbed. You’re ignoring his gang involvement.” During my time in the field, I verified that Spider was not in the gang. It was not difficult to find out who was actively gang involved. There were many indicators: whom the young person hung out with, who self-identified as a gang member, and how the young person interacted with known gang members. Community workers were also good sources. Most gang members were honest, because if their homies found out that they had negated the gang, the consequences could be devastating. I had found no signs that indicated that Spider was involved in the gang. However, the gang detective came to a different conclusion and placed him in the gang database. The rampant use of the gang database was an additional factor which accentuated the criminalization process. Police officers constantly placed young men in this database, allowing any other officer who came into contact with the boys to have detailed information about what “turf ” they belonged to or where they were last stopped or when they were last questioned. It appeared that the police classified young people as gang members in order to benefit from the ability to keep track of them and impose harsher restrictions and policing on them. This categorization later affected Spider during a criminal case, in which he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, for the benefit of the gang, after he got into a fight with a guy who was making fun of him for getting stabbed. The gang enhancement carried an added five-year sentence. When the police classified Spider as a gang member, school staff, community workers, and other adults in the community also adopted this categorization. The punishment that Spider encountered, after being viciously attacked, was not an isolated case of individual rogue gang detectives: there was a recurring pattern of criminalizing the victim in the lives of these young men. Meanwhile, police officers, school personnel, probation officers, and even community workers supported the labeling of Spider as a culprit, despite his being the victim who had been stabbed. [ 78 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Spider’s School Two months before Spider was stabbed, I visited the East Oakland Continuation School (EOCS),5 which Spider and six other boys in this study attended. The EOCS was a school for those students who had already been officially labeled as deviant and delinquent by the Oakland Unified School District and who were no longer allowed to attend the “regular” high school. The school welcomed me in as a community member who could mentor some of the youth at the school. The first person at the entrance of the school was a security guard named Shirley, a short, chubby Black woman who looked about thirty-five years old. She spoke with a deep voice and always seemed to stand on her toes. Her modus operandi was to “mean mug” (stare down) every student who walked in through the gate, as if to remind them whom they would have to face if they were defiant that day. Once the students were inside the school, another security guard checked them with a handheld metal detector to make sure they did not bring a weapon to school. As Spider dragged his left leg across the school yard to keep his baggy pants from falling, the middle-aged, six-foot-tall, White, male school principal walked by us. “Mr. Juarez!” he called in a deep voice. “You’re not going to give us any trouble today. Right?” “I’m cool, Mr. Ellis,” replied Spider. The school was small, made up of three dilapidated World War II–era bungalows placed perpendicular to one another to form a courtyard. The courtyard was all cement, with a few benches and two basketball hoops. On rainy days, Spider and the other students wore their hoods in class, in case the roof started leaking on their heads. Spider and I walked into class. Although class had already started, the teacher was missing. Students sat in groups of four, facing each other. The class was composed of seven Latinos and eight Blacks. One of the students played a rap song on his cell phone’s speaker: “I’m raw, I’m raw, I’m raw . . .” the song continued, then the sound was interrupted by a young Black lady who talked on her cell phone: “Yeah, bitch. You crazy bitch . . . Yeah, bitch . . .” One of the Latino males, Julio, looked at his Black classmate, Jason, and said, “You got some coke?” “Coke? Nigga! Is you crazy? You do it all?” replied Jason. Julio looked at him with a serious look and said, “Everything: pills, crystal, smoke, drank. Tienes de la negrita? [You got some little black stuff?] You know, heroin?” I found that the boys I observed often pre[ 79 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions tended to use more drugs than they were really using. Julio was always at school, and rarely on the streets, during the times I conducted my observations. He was headed for graduation and never displayed any signs of major drug use such as being on the streets, not attending school, or being distracted in the classroom. I believe Julio was pretending to use various drugs in order to appear “crazy” around the other boys and possibly to gain their respect. The school later suspended Julio and reported him to the local police officer for asking other students if they had drugs to offer. The teacher finally walked into the classroom. He was a substitute. The school had trouble finding permanent teachers. One possible reason was the school’s notoriety: recently a student had placed a chokehold on the principal. As the substitute, a fifty-year-old, light-skinned Black male, walked in, a seventeen-year-old Black male, Deandre, said to him, “Hey, bra [bro], what’s up with it, bra.” The substitute ignored him and turned to the girl who was using her cell phone: “Hang that up.” She told her friend, “I’ll call you back, bitch. My teacher wants me.” The teacher told the students to open their Earth Science books to page 223. “Today’s lesson is about rocks,” he told the students. Deandre grunted, “I don’t care ’bout no rock.” The substitute responded, “You will when it starts shaking!” Deandre replied, “That’s when niggas start running!” The teacher dropped the book and scolded the students, “You know where you are headed? . . . Narcissism is gonna lead you to prison.” The students all looked down. At this point, I turned to Spider. He gave me a look, raising his right eyebrow, as if to tell me, “I told you so.” I looked down. The teacher finally convinced another student to read to the class. A few minutes later the bell rang. I asked the substitute about his narcissism remark. He replied, “You know, these students have some internalized nihilism [sic]. They are just here out of the rain from the streets. They come here wanting you to bring them up-to-date. What causes unconformity? That is what we have a lot of here.” Spider walked into the classroom to check on me and overheard the last part of the teacher’s remarks. “You saying I’m slow?” he asked. “No, I’m saying that if you keep acting slow and continue gang banging, you going to prison,” the teacher replied. Spider insisted, “I ain’t no gang member. You trippin’, cuz.” The school had a high turnover rate with teachers and substitutes. When new teachers arrived, they attempted to use [ 80 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions their unique pedagogical approaches to connect with students; some of them were really nice, others really mean, and many in-between. But all the teachers had one practice in common: whenever any student misbehaved, the teachers would threaten either to call the police, to send them to jail, or to call a probation officer (sometimes, even for those students who were not on probation). In the school’s attempt to maintain order, it used the full force of criminal justice institutions to regulate students’ behavior. Although this school was for students already labeled delinquents, these boys reported receiving the same treatment at the “regular” schools they attended as well. Later on in the day, Spider and I walked outside the school gate. As we walked past the security guard, I heard a walkie-talkie buzz, and the guard said, “Officer Miles, we have a few of them walking your way.” We walked a few blocks to International Boulevard, and an all-black patrol car, with no police markings—what the kids referred to as a “Narc”—turned the corner. The officer stared us down. He drove down the street, made a U-turn, and drove slowly right behind us. “Shit! That’s the mothafucker that beat down Marquill the other day in front of McDonald’s, remember?” I remembered: two weeks before, a Black male student walked into the school at the end of the lunch period, his extra-long white T-shirt soiled with black tar and his lip busted open, with red flesh showing. One of his friends asked him, “What happened?” “The Narcs, they beat my ass.” He replied in monotone, with little emotion as he walked, head bowed, to the boys’ bathroom. Slick had witnessed the beating. According to Slick, Marquill had talked back to the police officer. The officer got out of the car, grabbed Marquill by his T-shirt, and slammed him onto the grunge-covered cement parking lot of the McDonald’s. The White officer stood over Marquill for a few minutes. Then Marquill was released and returned to school. I had never seen Slick display so much fear, even when he recounted his stabbing story. I turned to Slick and told him, “Let’s just keep walking. We’ll be fine.” The officer continued to follow us, driving slowly behind us. Slick became paranoid, turned around, and gave the officer a dirty look. I turned to look. The officer, a White man with a shaved head in his late thirties, looked at us, grinned, and drove off. Police officers played a crafty cat-and-mouse game in which the boys remained in constant fear of being humiliated, brutalized, or arrested. [ 81 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions This officer often stationed himself at the McDonald’s parking lot. Most of his work appeared to revolve around looking for traffic violations or waiting for the school to call when a student misbehaved. The school had impeccable communication between the security officer, the administrators, and this police officer. I witnessed eight events when police were called by the security officer for students talking back, cursing, or other minor school-rule transgressions. At EOCS, stigma, labeling, detention, harassment, and humiliation were just about the only consistent experiences that young people could count on as they entered the school. If students attempted to resist this criminalization by acting up, a violent police officer lurked. For the boys, the school represented just another space where they were criminalized for their style and culture. The school, in the eyes of the boys, was indistinguishable from the police officer stationed at McDonald’s, the adults in the community who called the police on them, or the community-center staff who ousted them. Jose, who also attended the school, put it into perspective: “Man, it’s like every day, teachers gotta sweat me, police gotta pocket-check me, mom’s gotta trip on me, and my PO’s gotta stress me. . . . It’s like having a zookeeper watching us at all times. We walk home, and we see them [probation officers and police]; we shoot some hoops, and we see them; we take a shit at school, and we see them.”6 After school, Jose would take a two-hour bus ride to Berkeley to visit his cousins and attend a court-mandated community-center program facilitated by his probation officer. Since Jose lived in Berkeley at the time of his last court hearing, he was assigned a probation officer stationed at a Berkeley community center. Jose was required to check in with him once a week. Parents The young people I interviewed also perceived themselves to be criminalized by parents. School personnel, police, and probation officers provided the boys’ parents with “courtesy stigmas.” A “courtesy stigma” is a stigma that develops as a result of being related to a person with a stigma.7 The conversations that school personnel, police, and probation officers had with one another about troubled youths almost always followed the [ 82 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions same trajectory: “These parents need to learn how to discipline these kids”; “It’s their parents’ fault for letting them do whatever they want”; “It’s no surprise that they’re this way—look at their parents.” These are just a few examples of countless depictions of parents as deviants, like their children. Authority figures often attempted to intervene and teach parents the “right way” to parent. For instance, a probation officer periodically visited Jose’s mother in Oakland and attempted to influence how she parented. Jose’s mother, Rosario, explained, “The [probation officer], he frightens me. He comes over and tells me, ‘Why don’t you learn to be a mother? Take away all this gangster stuff from Jose. You are at fault for what he does.’” This process sometimes changed the relationship that youths had with their parents. Some parents came to have similar perspectives as police and probation officers. Fourteen of the boys reported not having trusting relationships with their parents and believed that their parents would turn them in to authorities for arguing with them. Parents felt compelled to obey the discourse provided by the youth control complex: “Your child is a deviant, your child needs to be scrutinized and policed, and when your child acts negatively in any kind of way, such as dressing like a ‘thug,’ you need to call probation and police.” For Jose and most of the other boys, their perceptions of being watched, managed, and treated as criminals began at a young age and became exacerbated after their first offense, in most cases, a misdemeanor. Their minor transgressions branded them with a mark that would make their one-time criminal act into a permanent criminal identity. Part of the process of making Jose feel that he was constructed as a criminal was his mother’s participation in his criminalization. He believed that she was forced to listen to school and criminal justice authorities’ agendas on how to parent, especially after his first arrest. According to Jose and his mother, he was first arrested for carrying a ten-dollar bag of marijuana. They found that everyone in the community treated Jose differently after his first arrest. Jose began to feel watched, police began to randomly stop and search him, and his teachers would threaten him with calling his probation officer if he disobeyed at school. And, despite his mother’s empathizing with the negative treatment he was now receiving, she constantly reminded him that he would end up in jail if he misbehaved, and she used these threats as a means to discipline him.8 [ 83 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Probation According to the boys I interviewed, probation officers served the purpose of punishing them by branding them criminals in front of the rest of the community and by marking their territory in the settings through which the boys navigated. Community centers made office space available for probation officers.9 Parents were constantly interacting with probation officers and were often being chastised and influenced by them. Teachers had direct contact with probation officers, in order to inform them when boys misbehaved. Schools also provided office space for police and probation officers to check in with trouble students. The probation experience varied for the boys. Some of the boys had probation officers that required them to check in once a week. Others knocked on doors at 7:45 in the morning once a week to make sure the youngster was getting ready and planning to go to school. Most, however, had high and unrealistic expectations of the boys but did not play a role in aiding them in meeting these expectations. For example, Deandre’s probation officer, Ms. Moore, wrote a contract for him, full of unreachable goals, which he showed me soon after meeting with her: “Find a job. Pass all your classes. Do not get caught hanging out with your old friends.” Weeks went by, and Ms. Moore did not check in with Deandre. Although he attempted to “stay legit,” he found no work. I watched and helped him apply to twelve jobs. After a few weeks, he had not received one call. Meanwhile, he did not pass all his classes because the two weeks he spent in juvenile hall led to a failed semester at school, and he could not stay away from his old friends because they all lived in the same apartment complex and went to the same school he attended. While Deandre seemed like a victim of his circumstances, I also noticed that he developed creative ways to walk the tightrope between the contradictory expectations of the streets and those of his probation officer. I observed Deandre’s crafty strategy to avoid trouble around his friends. After being placed on probation, Deandre took a passive role in his “crew.” He shied away from partaking in visible activities, such as walking in a large group or playing dice on the sidewalk. Instead, he “chilled,” mostly on his front steps, and avoided joining the crew when they talked about fighting. Despite strategic attempts to stay out of trouble, the sys[ 84 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions tem caught up with him, as it does with the majority of youths on probation. No matter how crafty a young person was at attempting to stay away from trouble, his probation officer found a way to “violate” him, arrest him again for the smallest of infractions. While probation generated a desire to change in many young people’s minds, the resources to produce outcomes in their attempts to change were not provided. Probation was successful at forcing young people to discuss personal responsibility and reflect on their own actions, but it completely failed at providing young men the resources necessary for desisting from crime. The criminalization process was already in motion, leading probation officers to overlook this desire to change and instead to focus on minor transgressions, such as violating curfew or hanging out with known gang members, many of whom were family or next-door neighbors. It would have taken consistent case-management work to help Deandre meet Ms. Moore’s requirements; however, she did not meet with Deandre again until three months after his release. When she finally met with him, she arrested him because he had violated his probation: a police officer had caught him hanging out with his friends, and he had failed all his classes. After being released, Deandre believed that his probation officer was teaching him a lesson. “She be doing too much, man. She don’t help a nigga out, but then she lock a nigga up for stupid shit, yadadamean [you know what I mean]?” Probation meetings are one-on-one meetings, often mandated at least once per month, in which a young person is asked by his or her probation officer a series of questions centered on desisting or “staying straight.” According to the boys, a good probation officer could provide access and connections to programs and jobs. Out of thirty boys on probation, only five believed that their probation officers were helpful. The other twenty-five boys reported having probation officers who spent less than twenty minutes talking to them and who were obsessed with hearing a confession of the boy’s violation of probation. I rode the bus to downtown Oakland with three of the boys on three different occasions. All three of the boys were in and out of their appointments within fifteen minutes. “What did he tell you?” I asked. “Nothing,” they responded and proceeded to describe the probation officer’s lecturing them about doing well in school. At community centers, this also seemed to be the case. [ 85 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions While probation officers did not give good advice or connect youths to programs, they did maintain close contact with police and community workers. The overpolicing-underpolicing paradox existed here: probation officers were rarely around to help young men through the process of staying free but were consistently there to chastise or arrest them when they were purported to have violated the law. At the end of the boys’ initial arrest, all of them were placed on probation and required to report to their probation officers. The meetings would sometimes take place at neighborhood community centers located near the youngsters’ homes. The boys did not like the community-center arrangement because everyone knew when they were checking in with their probation officer. Although at one point, some of the boys believed this to be “cool,” after a while, boys such as Deandre became frustrated and felt stigmatized by the reality of having to walk into a community center to check in with a probation officer in front of the entire community. Theoretically, this kind of shame might help someone like Deandre “reintegrate” into the community, by feeling ashamed to have committed a crime due to the public shaming, which held him accountable to the entire community for his misdeeds. However, the community seemed to respond to Deandre and the other boys not through an “I will help you learn your lesson,” “tough love” perspective but through an “I hope you get arrested again” punitive perspective. From the perspective of juvenile probation and many school personnel, the point of the probation officer’s being present at community centers and schools was to make sure that youths who were on probation did not commit another crime. Often, the probation officer served as a coercive force, which constantly reminded youngsters that a pair of handcuffs was waiting for them as soon as they committed their first infraction. Fourteen of the boys were released from probation during the three-year study. Twelve of the boys were arrested soon after. Their violations, all minor, included being drunk in public, violating curfew, being suspended at school, and hanging out with old friends. Despite being off of probation, the boys continued to be tracked. Probation officer–youth relations were overwhelmingly negative and punitive, with probation officers being a disruptive control force in the boys’ lives, waiting for them to, as Jose put it, “fuck up.”10 By being pres[ 86 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions ent in all aspects of the youths’ lives, probation officers could potentially have a positive impact on the boys’ rehabilitation and reintegration into society. Often, the boys did follow the strict orders of the probation officer, but only in the direct presence of the officer. Probation officers’ punitive approach failed to teach young people how to desist on their own, through self-control instead of through external threat. This threat often developed resentment in the boys and led to resistance, which was sometimes articulated through deviance and criminality. While direct punitive control kept many of the young men from committing crime, many of them ended up being arrested anyway, for the most minor of infractions, which were no longer independent crimes but “crimes” of violating a probation contract. This occurred because the young men resisted many of the unrealistic expectations which probation imposed, including being home by 8 p.m. and checking in with the probation officer at the local community center, where peers would see them interacting with law enforcement and sometimes ask them if they were “snitches.” Probation placed the boys between a rock and a hard place; if they followed their probation program, they ran the risk of being victimized by others who saw them as snitches. This, in turn, led many of the boys to be rearrested for simple infractions. Probation created a magnifying-glass effect for the boys, which led them deeper into the criminal justice system for the most minor of infractions, violations which were often outside of criminal code and fell under the purview of school or community rules and norms, such as being suspended, having an argument with parents, or cursing at a store clerk. Slick’s probation officer, Mr. Johnson, a Black man in his forties, always wore a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. He was about six feet tall. His demeanor was gruff. He reminded me of characters that actor Clint Eastwood played in vigilante Wild West movies. When I first introduced myself to him, he asked me what I was going to do to keep Slick off the street. “Either you are helping him, or you are in his way,” he told me. On another occasion, I was at Slick’s home talking with him and his mother. Mr. Johnson paid a surprise visit, pounding Slick’s metal door gate. Slick knew it was Mr. Johnson by the way he knocked. As he heard the pounding he turned to his mom and said, “Ese cabron ya llego a cagar el palo. Me va querer llevar a la carcel.” [That asshole is here to harass me. He is [ 87 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions going to want to take me to jail.] Slick had been scared into following his probation program by Mr. Johnson. However, fear tactics generally did not work with the boys, since the effects of such tactics were shortlived. Sure, Slick was afraid of being arrested the first few times that Mr. Johnson yelled at him. But after a while, Slick began to resist this punitive treatment, sometimes even purposely breaking probation rules. Philosopher Michel Foucault argues that the practices and architecture of constant surveillance, what he calls “panopticism,” makes individuals internalize their punishment and become self-disciplined, docile bodies.11 But in Oakland, young men were not being taught this self-discipline. Instead, the criminalization which existed in this context led the boys to manipulate the system, by agreeing to obey under coercion and, at the same time, resisting this coercion by breaking the rules which they had agreed to follow. In Foucault’s formulation, the disciplined subject sits at the periphery of the panopticon, with the disciplinarian power at the center, keeping a constant gaze on the subject. This soft surveillance is intended to reform the soul and produce an obedient subject. The ultimate goal of the panopticon, according to Foucault, is to create self-discipline in the prisoner. This process is scientific, neat, and controlled. The kind of discipline I found in the streets of Oakland differs drastically. The boys in Oakland were placed at the center of the panopticon. Punitive treatment surrounded them, beaming itself in high intensity, from multiple directions. Different from Foucault’s panopticon, the punishment I found in Oakland was aimed at controlling and containing the young men who were seen as risks, threats, and culprits. The boys in Oakland were not seen as souls that needed to be disciplined but as irreparable risks and threats that needed to be controlled and ultimately contained. The discipline imposed on the boys in Oakland did not do much to reform the soul. Instead it incapacitated them as social subjects; it stripped them of their dignity and humanity by systematically marking them and denying them the ability to function in school, in the labor market, and as law-abiding citizens. The boys did not learn to self-discipline; instead, they resisted, became incapacitated, or both. The boys knew they were being watched, and so they resisted; they created a spectacle of the system, exposing its flaws and contradictions, which in turn led to an altered sense of having recovered some dignity. In a secu[ 88 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions ritized Oakland, Foucault’s panopticon had been flipped on its head: it had become inverted, placing the boys at the center of the complex, with forces of punitive social control surrounding them, delivering them constant ubiquitous punishment and criminalization, leading many to resist. Although direct threat and coercion from probation officers worked well in changing youth behaviors, it was only a temporary fix. As soon as the boys were taken off the intensive probation program of electronic monitoring, weekly meetings, and home arrest, they began to commit acts which further criminalized them and which often led to a second arrest. They often expressed that being contained, monitored, and threatened for so long made them unable to control themselves when the direct authoritative treatment was removed. They had been trained to live under forceful supervision and sanctions from the state, and, now, there was no other mechanism by which to regulate their behavior or to teach them how to function as healthy young adults. The boys had not been able to find positive, informal social control based on nurturing, guidance, and support; instead, they had encountered a system of control which disciplined them through punitive force.12 The system may have been fooled by the fact that the boys followed orders when they were under direct supervision. In Slick’s case, the immediate threat of violence and incarceration led to short-term desistance. However, once the threat was removed, Slick was left with no guidance to continue to avoid crime. This punitive approach did not work, because the boys did not develop navigational skills necessary for becoming productive citizens. The boys needed to learn how to desist on their own behalf, through internal controls, so that a punitive and highly expensive system of control would no longer be necessary. Criminologists John Hagan and Bill McCarthy explain the difference between debilitating social control and rehabilitative social control: “Normal shame and shaming produce social solidarity, whereas pathological shame and shaming produce alienation.”13 Normal shame is the process by which a community member is held accountable for his or her transgressions by way of shaming, so that he or she learns, makes amends, and becomes reintegrated into the group or society. Pathological shaming is the process by which the transgressor is permanently stigmatized, shamed into feeling like a permanent outsider, and perpetually humili[ 89 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions ated for his or her negative behavior. This in turn leads the transgressor to become disintegrated from the group or society. When young people are integrated back into society and “taught a lesson” through self-reflection and the development of internal controls, they see themselves as part of the community and hence hold themselves accountable. When they are shamed through criminalization, young people resist and lose hope, often leading to more crime or criminalization. Eighteen of the youths in this study had probation officers who placed the burden on them to immediately change their social worlds by avoiding their friends or to face further punishment and criminalization. They all felt that their probation officers had given them advice which did not work on the streets with their peers. And many of the youths did attempt to use the threat of probation or juvenile hall as an excuse to stay away from some of their old peers, in order to avoid being stigmatized for attempting to improve in school, avoid drugs and alcohol, and avoid committing violence. However, because many of their friends had already been to jail, they knew the storyline: probation officers exaggerated their threats, and youths who began to hang out again with old friends did not immediately go back to jail. Probation officers had minimal credibility with the boys. Peers who had been to jail would simply explain to their friends that the probation officer was exaggerating and that most of the time they would not get caught if they broke probation. “Come on, fool, just kick it with us,” I heard Slick’s friends tell him one day at the park, “That busta’ ain’t gonna arrest you. They just tell you that to scare you.” Because probation officers often tested the boys for marijuana use through a urine test, some of the boys became cocaine users after they were placed on probation. “Cocaine,” as Slick described, “stays in your system for two days. Dank [marijuana] stays in your system for thirty days.” This obsession with finding marijuana use in young people is indicative of how cracking down on less harmful offenses often led young people to “graduate” into more harmful yet less targeted offenses. Police and probation officers often communicated with shopkeepers and community members about the “criminals” whom they should look out for. Ronny, a Black youth who moved back and forth between Oakland and Berkeley, began to realize a few weeks after being placed on probation that everyone in the community knew about his arrest and [ 90 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions probation program. “I walked into the liquor store, and the Arab told me, ‘I know the police are after you, so if you do anything, I’m gonna call them.’” I asked him, “Did you steal anything? Had you ever stolen anything there?” “No. I just talk shit to him because he won’t front me a soda when I’m broke.” Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Community Centers Eight of the boys who had been previously arrested and four of the boys who had not been arrested were enrolled in community-center programs. Two were enrolled in a community center in Berkeley, because they had previously lived there. The rest of the youths were enrolled in two different organizations in Oakland. Each center claimed to serve between two hundred and seven hundred youths per year. Community workers estimated that over ten thousand young people lived in the neighborhoods which their centers serviced. The lack of community programs for young people, in all the neighborhoods where the boys lived, was observable. When the boys were asked, “Would you join a program that took you on field trips or where you could play sports or talk to a mentor or get a job?” all of them responded, “Yes.” However, only four of them were able to enroll in community programs without any strings attached. The other eight enrolled because they were mandated by probation. This was a common pattern: criminal justice institutions sometimes held a stake in youth programs. During the three years of this study, I noticed that funding for case workers from foundations and non-criminal-justice government agencies declined, and funding from criminal justice entities became available. At one point, a former gang member turned community worker, Joey, had been funded through various grants to provide mentoring for gang youths in the community. As the money for this position expired, the community center turned to the county probation department to continue to fund the position. The county agreed but wanted direct oversight of Joey. Over time, youths who had grown to trust Joey and respect him came to see him as a “snitch” for the probation department and the police. Eventually, Joey lost the boys’ respect, became ineffective in the community, and was laid off by the community center. [ 91 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions Although these organizations claimed to serve “at-risk” youths, very few of the boys in this study were accepted or invited to enroll in programs. Instead, the community centers focused on youths who they thought would respond to their programming. This made sense, because their funding was dependent on their “numbers.” Angelo, a youth-programs director at Communities Organizing Youth (COY), explained: Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Angelo: You see, I try to help the at-risk ones, you know, the ones that are on the street. But they [his boss] tell me, ‘If you help them, we won’t get funded,’ because, as you know, when you put time into the crazy youth, they take up a lot of time. VR: So, are you able to give programming to any of the street youth? Angelo: The one, two programs we have for them come from probation. One is anger management, and the other is life skills. VR: What do they do? Angelo: They learn about controlling their anger and about living a healthy lifestyle. VR: Who runs the programs? Counselors? Community members? Angelo: POs [probation officers] mostly. Although the community centers hired some charismatic individuals with transformational skills, people who in the past had helped to transform the lives of some of the toughest youths in the community, their hard work and youth-development approach was rarely institutionalized. Charismatic individuals were given a large caseload and were burdened with high expectations from many people in the community. This led many of them to burn out. Nene, another former gang member turned charismatic youth worker, explained, “Man! I like working with the youngsters, but this red-tape bullshit of having to feel like a snitch for probation is getting to me. . . . The other day I caught myself threatening one of the boys to call the police if they kept talking in my workshop.” Although many youth workers did not use this approach—to contact a police officer or to report an incident to a probation officer—many of the boys reported having this experience when the community center called probation or police for non-criminal activity. [ 92 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions In recent years, an influential program known as Cease-Fire has been implemented in communities across the country, including in Oakland. The Cease-Fire project calls for identifying hard-core community members who may potentially commit violence, calling them in for a meeting with law enforcement and community workers, threatening the potential transgressors that they will be watched and punished if they commit a crime, and offering programs to them if they choose to “go legit.” Although this study did not document Cease-Fire because it started after I left the field, a program such as this may pose the risk of entangling law enforcement with community workers even further. Dire consequences result from this process. Community centers sometimes seemed like criminal justice centers to some of the boys, places where programming was provided by law-enforcement officials, instead of youth-development workers. However, if police stick to their terrain to protect the community, and programs are created to help young people who have expressed an interest in change, then a program like Cease-Fire may prove promising. The key is to invest enough resources in social programs which are independent from, and set clear parameters between, themselves and criminal justice institutions. Otherwise, young people perceive the various institutions in the community as accomplices in a plot to criminalize them. The young men in this study compared encounters with police, probation officers, and prosecutors with interactions they had with school administrators and teachers who placed them in detention rooms; community centers that attempted to exorcise their criminality; and even parents, who felt ashamed or dishonored and relinquished their relationship with their own children altogether. It seemed, in the accounts of the boys, that various institutions were collaborating to form a system that degraded them on an everyday basis. As such, these young men’s understanding of their environment as a punitive one, where they were not given a second chance, led them to believe that they had no choice but to resist. These institutions, though independently operated with their own practices, policies, and logics, intersected with one another to provide a consistent flow of criminalization. The consequences of this formation were often brutal. Young Ronny explained, [ 93 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32. The Coupling of Criminal Justice and Community Institutions Copyright © 2011. New York University Press. All rights reserved. We are not trusted. Even if we try to change, it’s us against the world. It’s almost like they don’t want us to change. They rather we stay crazy than to try to pick ourselves up. Why they gotta send us to the ghetto alternative high school? We don’t deserve to go to the same school down the street? . . . And when we try to apply for a job, we just get looked at like we crazy. If we do get an interview, the first question is, “Have you been arrested before?” . . . We got little choice. Ronny understood his actions as responses to this system of punishment, which restricted his ability to survive, work, play, and learn. As such, he developed coping skills that were often seen as deviant and criminal by the system. Sociologist Elijah Anderson reminds us that young men, in these kinds of situations, react by demonstrating mistrust of the system: “Highly alienated and embittered, they exude generalized contempt for the wider scheme of things, and for a system they are sure has nothing but contempt for them.”14 Spider’s experiences with police not protecting him and instead marking him as a gang member solidified his mistrust and contempt for the police. In addition, his experiences in a school where teachers warned him about his inevitable entry into the criminal justice system and where security guards reported students to police for minimal transgressions led Spider to believe that he was caught in the center of a web of punishment, which consistently and ubiquitously constrained him. This web of punishment, the youth control complex, added to the boys’ blocked opportunities but also generated creative responses, which allowed the boys to feel dignified. Sometimes these responses even led to informal and formal political resistance. [ 94 ] Rios, Victor M.. Punished : Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=865849. Created from wwu on 2024-01-04 20:30:32.