On a Tuesday evening earlier this month, sociologist Victor Rios shared the results of his research about the relationship between the justice system and urban youth in front of a completely packed house at the UCSB MultiCultural Center Theater. His research, conducted both in Oakland (where he’s from) and in Santa Barbara (where he’s been a UCSB professor since 2006), all seemed to suggest that the justice system, as it currently stands, is training urban youth to have a destructive relationship with authority. But this problem isn’t one where causation is easy to identify and fix.
Early in the presentation, Rios shared stills from a video in which a young man in a school hallway is confronted by a group of rival gang members, restrained dramatically, and taken to the ground. That was far from the first incident of this nature that the student had been involved in, and he was eventually expelled from the school for his repeated association with gangs and “gang culture.”
“That student was me,” Rios revealed shortly thereafter. The footage was from a PBS documentary called School Colors, in which filmmakers followed Rios and other “urban youths” in order to document their gang-related trials and tribulations. Rios eventually overcame these trials, something that he says the PBS cameras bore witness to. “But they didn’t show that,” he remarks. The system, it seems to Rios, isn’t as interested in stories of reformation as they are stories of violence.