Punished By Victor Rios: Chapter Analysis

In Punished, Victor Rios examines the ways in which the discrimination of the criminal justice system and general society against poor black and Latino boys pushes them towards future criminal involvement. In Chapter 5 Rios describes the criminal actions of these young men as acts of survival or of resistance against the system which oppresses them. In a system which immediately criminalizes them, the young men are unable to get jobs or educations. Without the education and learned cultural capital obtained for a higher social class, they are unable to socially advance and experience class reproduction. They must then resort to criminal actions for economic survival and social dignity. When Rios describes the lack of cultural capital these young men suffer from, he aims to reach the root cause of the vicious cycle of criminalization and incarceration which they face. …show more content…
“Ronny did all he could to land the job,” Rios explains, “but the limited resources that he had at his disposal for showing respect may have kept him from getting the position” (101). Through experience, Ronny learned that the polite thing to do was to avoid shaking a white woman’s hand because she would simply recoil in fear. When he did not get the job, Ronny resorted to pirating and selling CDs. Without the chance of getting a legitimate job, many of the young men in the book resort to stealing things or to selling drugs in order to make money for survival. This further propels them into the criminal justice system, which leads to deeper stigmatization and then pushes them farther from the possibility of getting a stable, legal job or a good