Oakland, California. A Place Where People Call It Home

These issues of social control all work singularly and in tandem with each other to create a system where the young boys in Oakland mostly become self-fulfilled prophecies of criminals, drop outs, or gang members. Even I, despite my white

There are many Chinatown in this world, and the Chinatown of San Francisco has much historical significance; The Chinatown of San Francisco is the largest Chinatown in the United States, the largest community of Chinese Americans outside of China. Today I want to write about the of San Francisco base on my personal experience because there are many historic things I can illustrate. Before I started traveling this field trip, I did some researches carefully in San Francisco city guide, so I eager to travel as soon as possible. Finally I attended a free tour with San Francisco city guide, also they assigned a tour guide, Marann.

Culture in urban communities, also referred to as inner-cities, are growing increasingly violent. In the article, The Code of the Streets by Elijah Anderson, he begins to take an in-depth look at the root of the evil. He deduces that economic factors, parenting and the troublesome environments largely influence the violent norms within this culture.

Chapters 11 and 12 in “Not in My Neighborhood” deal with Edmonson Village, a quaint, Catholic and mainly white section of Baltimore. Nothing was out of place in Edmonson Village, with TV’s running schedules and businesses thriving. But the families in the houses would stay put, being the only owners most of the time. This would mean the entire generation borne from the times of segregation did not take kindly to African Americans trying to settle in. See, black people were being vastly mistreated. Living in slums and segregated from sanitary and adequate living. But after the Civil Rights Act is passed and separation of blacks and whites is outlawed, African Americans begin earning enough to live in better quality homes, and looking to more upscale parts of

Throughout my years living in Oakland I have seen violence and distress within my community. What most people hear about Oakland is never really anything positive; it’s mostly always negative. Oakland is known to have a history of gang violence, drug abuse, high school dropouts, teenage pregnancies, and social injustice. Within my research I find myself asking this question, ‘Why is there so much violence in Oakland? And what is the major contributor of this hardship that my community faces? Throughout my research I have learned that social injustice is a major contributor to Oakland violence, followed by the News media shown on television that also helps Oakland have a bad reputation. Most of the violence created in Oakland also comes from

“With no police force in California’s cities, criminals from all over flocked to San Francisco.” (Saffer,1) This meant that the criminals could commit their crimes with little fear of punishment. The criminals felt as if they could steal someone’s belongings, and not get caught then they would be fine. So, that’s why many people went over there. The San Francisco Gang was a group from New York. They always took gold, money, food, etc. But, after awhile another group of people from San Francisco put them on trial, they were then put in prison for 10 years. However, there wasn’t any prisons they could stay in so, they just frightened the gang and they never committed a crime from then on. Along with the San Francisco Gang, another gang came and started causing more trouble again. That gang repeatedly stole from stores, and homes taking everything they could. Until a group of 180 men called “Committee of Violence” they captured and hung some of the members of the gang, and threatened all the others. It must have been horrible without safety from criminals but as more cities grew, more prisons were

Chapter 4 in The Color of Justice: Race, ethnicity, and crime in America, was about the relations between society and law enforcement officers. This has been a major topic, especially in the United States for a long time. The unfortunate statistic that minorities are more likely to encounter being killed, arrested, and victimized by excessive physical force; has been a real issue even in today’s society. However, police departments are trying to combat the way police officers interact with the community; especially those of color. Although steps have been takes there are still some instances where police aggression happens. With all of the issues that arise between certain minority populated community’s police it is evident that conflict

There are different context in which labeling has specifically been used in the readings; however, there is an overarching theme in that the labels serve to undermine and to subjugate Latinos, Asian Americans and African Americans. The readings primarily focused on the criminalization and the perceived deviance of Latinos and Latino youth.

“It’s a war going on. The ghetto is a cage. They only give you two choices, be a rebel or a slave” Dead Prez, ‘Turn off the Radio’, 2002. It’s an epidemic that’s happening in major cities across America; racialized black and latino youth are pipelined directly into the criminal justice system through different institutions starting at a young age. These boys are marked for illegitimate gang activity at an early age, initiating the ongoing process where they are stigmatized in every aspect of their life for their negative credentials before they even have the opportunity to prove themselves. Victor Rios, author of Punished, names this phenomenon the Youth Control Complex and shadows several youth in the Oakland area, in hopes of bringing light to these injustices. Rios, having grown up in the ghetto himself, knows firsthand what it takes to escape this inevitable incarceration; mentorship from adults who care and opportunity fueled by the individual. The Youth Control Complex effectively criminalizes these boys at a young age, however through the sociological imagination one can see that the conditions are part of larger structural and societal processes.

Los Angeles witnessed a high amount of drug incidents and violence, which arose from the increasing drug problem. Unfortunately as the same time the nation witnessed a rise in the drug problem, it also saw a rise in police brutality. Throughout Los Angles and America there were many cases of police beatings, but there wasn’t any case that received as much attention and media coverage as the Rodney King incident. On the night of the Rodney King beating, “amateur video camera enthusiast, George Holliday, shot footage of LAPD officers beating a twenty-five year old African-American man following a traffic stop” (Alpert p.131). The question raised is why did something like this incident happen? In order to answer the question, a review of the police department is necessary. At the time of the Rodney King beating Daryl Gates had been the police chief of Los Angles for thirteen years. Chief Gates had power over the departments’ policies and personnel, and “his position was well insulated by unique civil service protections” (Alpert p.134). Chief Gates was recognized as someone who was professional and innovative on new ideas to enforce the law. He adopted militaristic technology as equipment to use in the streets. One example of the new technology was the motorized police battering rams, which were essentially tanks

The concept of hypercriminalization specifically leads Rios to question how punishment, surveillance, and the criminal justice system affect minority adolescent males. Additionally, Rios wanted to know how the roles of authority figures such as police, school teachers, parents, and probation officers influenced or hindered adolescent male’s lives. For the study, Rios decided to shadow and conduct in-depth interviews with forty adolescent males, both Latino and African-American between the ages of fourteen and seventeen at the time of recruitment, from neighborhoods around Oakland, California. Additionally, Rios observed and informally interviewed seventy-eight other adolescent males that were friends or acquaintances of the boys Rios selected to study in-depth.

African American boys are doubly displaced among society. Ann Arnett Ferguson says, “they are not seen as childlike but adultified; as black males they are denied the masculine dispensation constituting white males as being “naturally naughty” and are discerned as willfully bad”(page 80). These African American boys are thought of being two things, either a criminal or an endangered species. They are not allowed to be naughty by nature according to society, but rather there naughtiness is a sign of vicious, inherent, insubordinate behavior. African americans are seen as endangered victims, which makes them criminals. Ferguson states, “It is their own maladaptive and inappropriate behavior that causes African americans to self-destruct”(page 82). There are two versions of childhood that are contradictory to each other. A real child would be seen as a “little plants” ready to grow up accordingly which is what white men were like to educators. On the other hand the African American boys were seen as children who are powerful, self centered, and have an agenda of their own. These black boys are seen as adults from such a young age, they don’t have time to be young and grow up because others make it seem like they are already fully grown. This drives them in the path to do bad things and make bad decisions.

Many instances Tuttle states that the police not only condoned the beatings and killings but also participated in many of them. He often made the point of police involvement. Like when the two black officers came to arrest the suspected stoners the other white officers did not allow them to arrest them and let them go free. These actions put fear into blacks. Tuttle states, “They had expected little else of a police force which they had come to view as the armed representative of white hostility”(Tuttle, 33). These actions may explain the resentment and hatred of police today by many blacks.

This paper is going to explore what effect the labeling theory had in regards to the tragedy at Columbine High School. Were these two students labeled, to what extent and how if any did this labeling affect the events that took place in Jefferson county that fateful day.

In Crips and the Bloods we see multiple examples of labels continuing crime. First off, most of the children born in this area are black and poor. Already they are labeled and stereotyped as being dangerous to communities, useless to society, and destined for failure. One man says “I grew up in the hood, I was born in the hood, I was raised in the hood, and I’m going to die in the hood. I didn’t choose my destiny, my destination chose me” (Peralta, 2008). This phrase demonstrates the power of a label. He was born into a community of violence and gangs and there is no way for him to escape it. Because he was born into this particular setting, this man now considers himself a person from “the hood,” he behaves in ways that are congruent with society’s idea of what some from the “hood” would behave like. In order to uphold his label, the viewer notices that this man dresses and speaks in a manner that is consistent with the “hood” label. Of course these things are not criminal, but this example demonstrates the unescapable power of a label.