Victor Rios

Educator, author
Victor Rios seeks to uncover how to best support the lives of young people who experience poverty, stigma and social exclusion.

Why you should listen

Based on over a decade of research, Dr. Victor Rios created Project GRIT (Generating Resilience to Inspire Transformation) a human development program that works with educators to refine leadership, civic engagement and personal and academic empowerment in young people placed at-risk.

Rios is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in comparative ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005. His book Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys discusses the many ways in which young urban males of color encounter the youth control complex: a ubiquitous system of punitive social control embedded in what has come to be known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

What others say

“Many specialists in juvenile justice say they admire what Rios has achieved in Punished: to show, from his unusual perspective, how inner-city Latino and African-American boys develop their sense of self in the midst of crime and intense policing, and how it can come about that young minority men lose trust in the institutions of civil society.” — The Chronicle of Higher Education

Victor Rios’ TED talk