Jeffrey Reiman - The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Thinking Critically About Class and Criminal Justice

For 40 years, this classic text has taken the issue of economic inequality seriously and asked: Why are our prisons filled with the poor? Why arent the tools of the criminal justice system being used to protect Americans from predatory business practices and to punish well-off people who cause widespread harm?

This new edition continues to engage readers in important exercises of critical thinking: Why has the U.S. relied so heavily on tough crime policies despite evidence of their limited effectiveness, and how much of the decline in crime rates can be attributed to them? Why does the U.S. have such a high crime rate compared to other developed nations, and what could we do about it? Are the morally blameworthy harms of the rich and poor equally translated into criminal laws that protect the public from harms on the streets and harms from the suites? How much class bias is present in the criminal justice system both when the rich and poor engage in the same act, and when the rich use their leadership of corporations to perpetrate mass victimization?

The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison shows readers that much of what goes on in the criminal justice system violates citizens sense of basic fairness. It presents extensive evidence from mainstream data that the criminal justice system does not function in the way it says it does nor in the way that readers believe it should. The authors develop a theoretical perspective from which readers might understand these failures and evaluate them morallyand they do it in a short text written in plain language.

Readers who are not convinced about the larger theoretical perspective will still have engaged in extensive critical thinking to identify their own taken-for-granted assumptions about crime and criminal justice, as well as uncover the effects of power on social practices. This engagement helps readers develop their own worldview.

New to this edition:

• Presents recent data comparing the harms due to criminal activity with the harms of dangerousbut not criminalcorporate actions

• Updates statistics on crime, victimization, incarceration, wealth, and discrimination

• Increased material for thinking critically about criminal justice and criminology

• Increased discussion of the criminality of middle- and upper-class youth

• Increased coverage of role of criminal justice fines and fees in generating revenue for government, and how algorithms reproduce class bias while seeming objective

• Streamlined and condensed prose for greater clarity.

Jeffrey Reiman is the William Fraser McDowell Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at American University in Washington, DC. Dr. Reiman is the author of In Defense of Political Philosophy (1972), Justice and Modern Moral Philosophy (1990), Critical Moral Liberalism: Theory and Practice (1997), The Death Penalty: For and Against (with Louis P. Pojman, 1998), Abortion and the Ways We Value Human Life (1999), As Free and as Just as Possible (2012), and more than 60 articles in philosophy and criminal justice journals and anthologies.

Paul Leighton is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology at Eastern Michigan University. Dr. Leighton is the co-author of Punishment for Sale (with Donna Selman, 2010) and Class, Race, Gender and Crime (with Gregg Barak and Allison Cotton, 5th edition, 2018). He has been president of the board of his local domestic violence shelter and is currently head of the advisory board of his universitys food pantry.

Twelfth Edition

Jeffrey Reiman
and Paul Leighton

Twelfth edition published 2020

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2020 Jeffrey Reiman

The right of Jeffrey Reiman and Paul Leighton to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

First edition published by Wiley 1979

Eleventh edition published by Routledge 2017

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-367-23178-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-23179-8 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-27867-9 (ebk)

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For 40 years now, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison has been taking the issue of economic inequality seriously and asking: Why are our prisons filled with the poor? Why arent the tools of the criminal justice system being used to protect Americans from predatory business practices and to punish those well-off people who cause widespread harm?

The answer offered by The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison is that our criminal justice system is designed to use its weapons against the poor, while ignoring or treating gently the rich who prey upon the public. The Rich Get Richer invites readers to look at the American criminal justice system as if it were aimed, not at protecting us against crime, but at keeping before our eyesin our courts, prisons, news, screens, and criminology booksa large criminal population consisting primarily of poor people. This serves the interests of the rich and powerful by broadcasting the message that the real danger to most Americans comes from people below them on the economic ladder rather than from above. Looking at the criminal justice system this way makes more sense of the criminal justice policy than accepting the idea that the system is really aimed at protecting our lives and limbs and possessions. All of this is summed up by saying that the rich get richer and the poor get prison.

Supporting the thesis that the criminal justice system is aimed at maintaining a large visible population of poor criminals requires defending two main claims: first, that the system could reduce our high crime rates but fails to do so, and second, that the system is biased against the poor at every stage. This second claim means that for the same crimes, the poor are more likely than the well-off to get arrested and, if arrested, more likely to be charged and, if charged, more likely to be convicted and, if convicted, more likely to be sentenced to prison and, if sentenced to prison, more likely to receive a long sentence. But it means even more: The bias against the poor starts earlier, at the point at which legislators decide what is to be a crime in the first place. Many of the ways in which the well-off harm the public (deadly pollution, unsafe working conditions and financial predation) are not even defined as crimes,