In his essay “The Hyper-Criminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration” Victor M. Rios shares with his readers the stories of three young males of color who have been in and out of juvenile halls since a very young age. All throughout his essay Rios mentions the different sorts of confrontation these young men and those like them have with law enforcement, teachers, guidance counselors and their parents. Rios goes on to say that the reason why those young males have become involved with gang violence and are now on probation is a result of where they have grown up and the way they are portrayed. Rios argues that because these teenagers come from low income communities where gang violence has a high rate the adults that they are surrounded by treat them as if they were criminals from a very young age and that is the cause for them ending up involved in gangs and criminal acts.
About 26.6% of all Latinos in the United States live in poverty, children who are born into these families are born with several disadvantages that they cannot change for example, living in low income communities and attending school with low graduation rates and very low test scores. Although these children and teenagers cannot change the families that they are born into and their families economic situation one thing that they can change is how they let those factors influence their lives. The reason why very few Latinos go on to continue a higher level of education after high school is because they allow themselves to be taken out by a system that has always been against them. They blame all those around them for their actions which led them to being involved in gangs, and dropping out of school.
I do agree with Rios’s argument that being treated as criminals because they come from Barrios and Ghettos is wrong however, the adults cannot be blamed for how the children of those communities turn out. One of the major problems with the those teens who end up involved with gangs and criminal acts is that they start to act as gang members and engage in criminal acts to teach those that see them a lesson yet they don’t stop to realize that all they are doing is hurting themselves. Rios gives the example of Jose who is annoyed at the fact that his mother, teacher and his parole officer are always checking up on him and do not trust that he will make good decisions. The problem with this example is that he is complaining that they do not trust him but the only one who is at fault there is Jose because he made the decision to get involved with a gang and has been in and out of juvenile hall since the age of thirteen, he has proved to the adults around him that he cannot be trusted to make good decision because he continues to make bad decisions.
Rios defends the teenagers instead of realizing that the only ones who are at fault are the teenagers for acting like children when they are told not to do something and they go and do it anyway because they are curious. The teenagers that Rios interviewed as well as those like them think they are teaching the system a lesson by becoming criminals, if they could only understand that the only lesson that they are giving to them is that they were right and that treating them as criminals was right all along because that is what they ended up to be. In order for the for the teenagers to truly teach the “system” a lesson would be for them to do the complete opposite of what they are doing now which would be for them to finish high school, go on to college and graduate and become something, for them to do something with their lives so that they can one day have a family and that their children do not grow up in the same neighborhood where they did and were treated as criminals.
- Alejandra
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