In the article by Victor M. Rios, he investigates the causes and effects of hyper criminalization of black and latino youth. He conducted ethnographic interviews with 40 youth in the Bay Area and discovers his subjects were criminalization in every area of their life. They criminalization by schools, their community, their family, and of course, the criminal justice system. It also discovered that systems that are supposed to be nurturing, such as community centers, school, and the family were all being infiltrated by the criminal justice system through the use of probation officers. At the end of his study, he concluded that the use of hyper criminalization and mass incarceration were used a way to find a place for poor youth of color where their role in the post-industrial mass incarceration era is undefined.…show more content… In his article, he states that in California, “latino youth represented 36% of the states youth population, however, they made up close to 60% of the state’s juvenile detainees” (41). He also goes on to say, “Black youth made up roughly 7.8% of the state’s population, yet they comprised almost 30% of juvenile detainees” (41). This statistics show that black and latino youth are overrepresented in the California’s criminal justice system. The issue at the time that produced these white supremacist responses was the emergence of the term “super-predators.” Super-predators is a term coined by John Diiulio, in reference to the youth of color he thought were going serious criminals. He claimed that “poor, urban youth of color were an emerging violent and criminal risk to society and that serious punitive policies had to be created to ‘deter’ and ‘incapacitate’ them as early an age as possible” (51). This rhetoric is what swayed the public and the government to support more punitive policies for youth of
