From Gangland To The Ivory Tower

As a boy in East Oakland, Victor Rios did the time: the gang, the juvy hall, the car thefts and fights.

And there were a lot of cops. The interactions were almost universally negative, and the former gang member describes a culture of mutually assured destruction.

Now, with a Berkeley Ph.D., Rios is still in the same old hood analyzing how young black and Latino young men are socially criminalized, in a swift pipeline from street to prison or probation.

This hour On Point

An old, rusty refrigerator had been knocked over on the side of Pelon’s garage. It was white, dented on the edges, and looked like it had not been used in a decade. Its metal cooling rods faced the open sky. A twenty-four case of Corona beer filled with empty bottles sat on top of the rods. We had tagged the refrigerator at the height of our delinquent careers;finely scrawled on the side in black marker were nicknames for sixty-eight of our “homies.”3 I was with Pelon, a former fellow gang member. We turned the refrigerator over and read aloud to each other, “Dre, Moreno, Sleepy, Conejo,” each homey coming to life as we said his name. Eventually we couldn’t help but count. Out of sixty-eight members in the gang—we estimated, based on memory and after making a few phone calls—twelve were in prison serving three years to life, sixteen were in jail or prison serving sentences ranging from three months to three years, and the remaining fortyhad been incarcerated at one point in their lives. We knew this because we had spent years on the streets together, looking out for one another, protecting each other and taking part of each other’s lives, like family. At this moment, on a cool spring evening in 2002, in front of this old refrigerator, it dawned on us that by the time we reached our early twenties, none of the homies had avoided incarceration.