Rios Youth Control: A System Of Control In The Justice System

Rios youth control complex is a system of control in which the justice system (the prison system) and the socializing and social control institutions (school system) work together to stigmatize, criminalize, and punish inner city youth. Accordingly, these adolescents’ are regarded as deviant and incompetent to participate within U.S. society. This web of control enforces punitive measures, which prevents marginalized people (youth of color, poverty stricken communities) from thriving, and creates social incapacitation (social death) among juveniles within the U.S. The social incapacitation these young people experience comes from criminalization, which is disguised as a protective mechanism. In other words, the punitive approach prevents youth

Thereby, institutions that were intended to nurture youth (schools) have been collapsed into the practice of surveillance and criminalization, often acting as the behest of police and probation officers. In the case of Spider, he was isolated from “regular” school and sent to EOCS, which was a school for students who had already been officially labeled as deviants and delinquents by the school district. There, many of the teachers had a common practice that whenever any student misbehaved, the teachers would threaten either to call the police, to send them to jail, or call their P.O. (sometimes, even for students that weren’t on probation). In the schools attempt to main social order, it used the full force of criminal justice institutions to regulate students’ behaviors with constant threats. Also, Rios accounts that Slick’s beating, a student at an EOC, was the result of the schools impeccable communication between a security officer, the administrators, and police officer Miles. At these types of teaching facilities, stigma, labeling, detention, harassment, and humiliation are just about the only consistent experience that adolescents could count on as they entered the school. If students attempted to resist criminalization by acting up, a police officer lurked nearby ready to pounce. In essence, school was simply an extension where young people were criminalized for their style and culture. As a matter of fact, many of the boys Rios describes, saw no distinction between the school and police officers who constantly lurked around them, like a “zookeeper watching over animals at all times.” Police officers played a crafty “cat and mouse game” in which adolescent boys remained in steady trepidation of being humiliated, brutalized, or detained. Hence, this sort of control is created by a