This is a well overdue and important contribution to our understanding of urban street youth and gangs. Rios turns the table on traditional gang researchers by showing how the process of criminalization and the youth control complex is biased against young boys of color. -Diego Vigil,author of The Projects: Gang and Non-Gang Families in East Los Angeles Rios's ... Read morebook is a valuable contribution to the field because it is an interdisciplinary work that addresses fundamental and ongoing concepts of juvenile delinquency and gang participation. -Madeleine Novich,Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Review Accessible, engaging and thought provoking, Punished presents unique data and compelling analytical insights, opening what should prove to be a fruitful line of research. For this reason and other reasons...this important book is a worthwhile read for anyone within or outside the academy who is looking to understand the punitive turn in American society from the perspective of those who are most heavily policed, punished and criminalized. -Social Forces This analysis gives great context to the lives of career criminals....Rios' work suggests that people drop out, commit crimes, and adapt themselves to a `fugitive life' because they are unable to find an institution that grants them the acknowledgment and dignity that they are systematically denied. -Du Bois Review With Punished, Rios joins an expanding cadre of social scientists who lament the directions that juvenile justice has taken in the United States in recent decades. He argues that in an era when the Unites States has achieved world-record levels of incarceration, of you people as well as adults, the widespread adoption of severe, hastily adopted get-tough-on-crime policies of the 1980s and 1990s has gone hand in hand with the vilification and persecution of black and Latino youths. -Peter Monaghan,The Chronicle Review Rios provides numerous conceptual innovations, noted below in italics, that should soon find their way into all of our introductory, deviance, and race/ethnicity texts.... A book bristling with insight. -Robert Garot,American Journal of Sociology Show Less