Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him

Anthropologist Ralph (Princeton Univ. Ctr. on Transnational Policing) situates his research in American prisons and amid urban poverty. He has documented the violence that is used as a tool of the state in The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence and that is endured daily by impoverished communities (Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago). One such community in San Francisco was home to Luis “Luisito” Alberto Quiñonez, the half-brother of Ralph’s stepson, and was where another teenager shot and killed Sito in 2019. The killing was allegedly an act of revenge for the murder of the killer’s own brother five years before, a crime for which Sito had served time but was proven innocent. The collision of Ralph’s academic expertise and his family life led him to produce a detailed examination of the ways media and the juvenile justice system treat young offenders as irredeemable “super-predators” and can actively incubate future violence. Audiobook narrator André Santana, a regular narrator of YA lit, has a youthful voice that emphasizes the ages of the victims and the victimizers in Sito’s story. Santana flawlessly matches his emotional cadence to Ralph’s blend of academic and personal writing for a truly immersive listen.