Victor Rios grew up in the ghetto of Oakland, California in the 1980s and 90s. A former gang member and juvenile delinquent, Rios managed to escape the bleak outcome of many of his friends and earned a PhD at Berkeley. He returned to his hometown to study the difficult lives of a new generation of young men facing violence, exclusion, and mass incarceration. He found that these young men encountered a ubiquitous system of punitive policies in their schools and communities, where they were constantly policed and stigmatized.