Human Targets Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth
by Victor M. Rios, foreword by James Diego Vigil
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Cloth: 978-0-226-09085-6 | Paper: 978-0-226-09099-3 | Electronic: 978-0-226-09104-4
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226091044.001.0001
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

At fifteen, Victor Rios found himself a human target—flat on his ass amid a hail of shotgun fire, desperate for money and a place on the street. Faced with the choice of escalating a drug turf war or eking out a living elsewhere, he turned to a teacher, who mentored him and helped him find a job at an auto shop. That job would alter the course of his whole life—putting him on the road to college and eventually a PhD. Now, Rios is a rising star, hailed for his work studying the lives of African American and Latino youth.

In Human Targets, Rios takes us to the streets of California, where we encounter young men who find themselves in much the same situation as fifteen-year-old Victor. We follow young gang members into schools, homes, community organizations, and detention facilities, watch them interact with police, grow up to become fathers, get jobs, get rap sheets—and in some cases get killed. What is it that sets apart young people like Rios who succeed and survive from the ones who don’t? Rios makes a powerful case that the traditional good kid/bad kid, street kid/decent kid dichotomy is much too simplistic, arguing instead that authorities and institutions help create these identities—and that they can play an instrumental role in providing young people with the resources for shifting between roles. In Rios’s account, to be a poor Latino youth is to be a human target—victimized and considered an enemy by others, viewed as a threat to law enforcement and schools, and burdened by stigma, disrepute, and punishment. That has to change.

This is not another sensationalistic account of gang bangers. Instead, the book is a powerful look at how authority figures succeed—and fail—at seeing the multi-faceted identities of at-risk youths, youths who succeed—and fail—at demonstrating to the system that they are ready to change their lives. In our post-Ferguson era, Human Targets is essential reading.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Victor M. Rios is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys and Street Life: Poverty, Gangs, and a Ph.D.

REVIEWS

“How do we move beyond the cycle of criminalization, violence, and mass incarceration that American society has been stuck in for the last several decades? Rios draws upon the perspectives of youth—the very ones most likely to be labelled, incarcerated, or killed—to provide insights to lead us out of our state of paralysis. Through his probing of their perspectives and experiences, Rios develops new and original ways of thinking about how to intervene, support, and alter outcomes for marginalized youth. Written in a style that is both rich in analysis yet still packed with an emotional fervor, Human Targets never allows us to forget that real lives are at stake even as it also provides hope that it is indeed possible to move beyond the dismal reality we find ourselves in.”
 
— Pedro Noguera, Distinguished Professor of Education, UCLA, and coauthor of Schooling for Resilience

“Human Targets is a gripping, disturbing, and deeply moving ethnographic account of interpersonal street violence. Told from the author’s heart, it is based on careful interviews and his own personal observation. Human Targets is a provocative yet subtle analysis of the relentless social forces that too often undermine and frustrate the everyday lives of a major segment of America’s urban population. Extraordinary and important, this book is a must read for anyone seeking to understand the culture of the city today—it needs to reach a wide audience beyond the halls of the academy.”
— Elijah Anderson, author of Code of the Street and The Cosmopolitan Canopy

“Training his attention on social problems he himself experienced growing up—street violence, poverty, racism—Rios is an important and original voice. In this patient and insightful relational ethnography, Rios shows how gang-associated Latino youth, often written off as a ‘lost generation,’ contain multitudes of identities and brim over with promise. But broken schools and justice systems far too often blunt these children’s potential and contribute to casting them on the wrong path. Critically urgent and rendered in clear prose, Human Targets is a must-read book that asks more of us.”
— Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226091044.003.0001
[interactional dynamics;Latino youth;gangs;multiple identities;labeling;cultural framing]
Rios opens the introduction with a recollection of his experiences as a young man selling heroin, and the violent encounter that caused him to reconsider his own trajectory. He uses this account as an entry point to his discussion of interactional dynamics within punitive contexts. Rios argues that institutions shape young people’s performances of identity, and the provision of resources and support is the key to creating a thriving framework for these youths. He outlines the scope of the book, which deals with the way authority figures fail to support young people and recognize their multiple dimensions, and the way young people fail to demonstrate to the system their readiness to change. Rios describes his study of gang-associated young people in a Southern California community and introduces a conceptual and theoretical framework to understand labelling processes. He closes by discussing cultural framing perspectives.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226091044.003.0002
[probation;education;discipline;culture of control;gangs]
This chapter focuses on Rios’ experience observing daily life at the Punta Vista Probation School. He describes how youths like Jorge and Mark exemplified multidimensionality and challenged simple type labels. According to Rios’ observations, Punta Vista’s conflicting roles as school and punitive institution enforced a culture of control that was inefficient at preventing or intervening in crime and instead produced resistance and magnified transgressions. Rios recounts how authority figures’ attempts to connect with the students often resulted in processes that were not in the youths’ best interests. Interviews with gang-affiliated young people showed that gang involvement could provide the clear, predictable rules and sense of authority that youths at the probation school were lacking. Rios discusses the way subcultures such as gangs allow for a refuge from stigmatization and marginalization while also creating spaces in which young people can express and practice the multiple frames of their identities.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226091044.003.0003
[gangs;policing;violence;Latino youth;adolescents;multiple frames;cultural practices]
In this chapter, Rios describes Golden State Liquors, a location that served as a communication hub and principal gathering point for the gang-associated boys he was observing. Rios explains how the storefront functioned as a safe zone that allowed them to find affirmation and refuge and to communicate with each other and network, while the street left them exposed to criminalization, police harassment, and incarceration. He credits the safety of Golden State Liquors in part to the liquor store owner’s understanding of the boys’ multiple frames and their consequent freedom from unreasonable expectations of adult behavior. Rios also recounts the story of Tonyo, a boy whose fraught relationship with the police led to him being unfairly targeting despite attempts to improve his outcomes and seek a productive life. The chapter closes with a discussion of lifestyles, contexts, and cultural misrecognition.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226091044.003.0004
[cholo style;cultural misframing;impressions;cultural frames;Mexican identity]
In this chapter, Rios and co-author Patrick Lopez-Aguado present a discussion of cultural misframing, or the process by which institutions construct, define, and impose simplistic, fixed, negative identities on individuals based on misunderstandings of their symbols, language, expressions, and actions. Rios and Lopez-Aguado focus on cholo style as a multidimensional practice of impression management that exhibits young Latino men’s fluid identities. Cholo style is intentionally oppositional to the mainstream, and the authors describe how youths who adopt this style participate in the construction of the “Mexican” as rebellious and resistant. Thereby, cultural frames that young people able to choose and utilize became part of a racial formation process. Rios and Lopez-Aguado also discuss the amplified criminalization of youths perceived as cholos, and the perilous masculinity that is closely linked to the cholo identity. They assert that cholo style is not a refusal to participate in mainstream society, but rather a refusal to be relegated to subservient positions.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226091044.003.0005
[masculinity;gender;violence;policing;Latino youth]
Along with co-author Rachel Sarabia, Rios discusses the concept of masculinity and its role in the lives of the young men he studied in Riverland. The authors describe how, in their observations, gang-associated young men used masculinity as a central vehicle by which to compensate for race and class subordination. The Latino youths adopted differing forms of masculinity – synthesized masculinities – to combat expectations imposed by the institutions around them. Rios and Sarabia explain how, since the boys were not able to be the kind of man mainstream society expected them to be, they forged alternative and sometimes detrimental forms of manhood that stressed being tough, gaining status and respect, and, like the police did onto them, demonstrating dominance over others.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226091044.003.0006
[policing;stop and frisk;Latino youths;violence;racial profiling;gangs]
In this chapter, Rios and co-author Samuel Gregory Prieto describe their observations from ride-alongs with police officers in the Riverland area. Through their analysis of police encounters with Latino, gang-associated youths, the authors note two distinct, contrasting approaches to policing: mano suave (soft-handed) and mano dura (hard-handed). Rios and Prieto explain the usage of stop and frisk and pretext policing, racial profiling, and the logic of prevention and paternalism that underlies the formal and informal surveillance of Latino youths by the police. They discuss how community policing, whose goal is to build trust and prevent negative interactions with police, can also contribute to punitive treatment and harsh outcomes. Rios and Prieto attribute many of these problems to officers’ misrecognition and misframing of a youth’s interactional and cultural cues. Ultimately, the authors argue that mano suave and mano dura policing – that is, the policing that ambiguously drifts between cordial and polite policing to punitive policing – is not a sustainable, moral, or efficient model.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226091044.003.0007
[illegality;immigration;labels;liminality;marginalization;frames;gangs]
This chapter begins with the story of Jorge, a Mexican youth who immigrated illegally into the US as a child. Rios uses Jorge’s example to introduce his discussion of illegality, the process by which people are labeled illegal by institutions, the law, and civil society. Illegality is discussed in the context of Punta Vista school, and Rios talks about how the de jure label by the state facilitates the cultural conditions for the de facto use of “illegal” as a mechanism for creating symbolic understandings of people in the community as more of a threat and less deserving. He explains how boys marked with the label of illegality are caught between two worlds, and how gang association provides a sense of belonging for them. Rios argues that the quality of the interactions youths have with institutional authorities and the labels they are given mediate the frames these youths adopt and influence the behavior outcomes young people perceive for themselves.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226091044.003.0008
[resources;mentoring;policy recommendations;cultural frames;marginalized youths]
This chapter begins with the story of Jorge, whose relationship with a mentor helped prevent him from shooting members of his old gang. Rios uses this example to show how resources and quality of interactions with authority figures matter for preventing violence and empowering marginalized youth. In the rest of the chapter, Rios offers policy and program recommendations in order to help police and schools improve their engagement with marginalized populations and prevent setting up more young people as human targets. These recommendations include training institutional workers on how to recognize, interpret, and translate a diverse array of cultural frames; developing and implementing quality-of-interactions measures in schools and police departments; incentivizing local businesses to support marginalized youths; hiring outreach workers in schools; investing in civic engagement employment opportunities; and investing in educational and legal fairness.