Analysis Of The Rich Get Richer And The Poor Get Prison

The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison by Jeffrey Reiman and Paul Leighton has been used for years as a way to address issues such as ideologies and class struggles within the criminal justice system. The book focuses on controlling crime, defining crime and disparities between social classes. I believe the book makes some very interesting points but was overall a waste of my time to read because most of what is said were things I was already very much aware of.
Through the first chapter of this book the focus was primarily on the notion of controlling crime. The best way to describe crime policy used in this chapter is comparing it to a game of ‘heads I win, tails you lose’. This chapter also addresses the causes for decline in America’s

The majority of our prison population is made up of African Americans of low social and economic classes, who come from low income houses and have low levels of education. The chapter also discusses the amount of money the United States loses yearly due to white collar crime as compared to the cost of violent crime. Another main point was the factors that make it more likely for a poor person to be incarcerated, such as the difficulty they would have in accessing adequate legal counsel and their inability to pay bail. This chapter addresses the inequality of sentencing in regards to race, it supplies us with NCVS data that shows less than one-fourth of assailants are perceived as black even though they are arrested at a much higher rate. In addition to African Americans being more likely to be charged with a crime, they are also more likely to receive harsher punishments for the same crimes- which can be seen in the crack/cocaine disparities. These harsher punishments are also shown in the higher rates of African Americans sentenced to

One such solution is the establishment of moral superiority of our criminal justice professionals over our ordinary citizens. It also discussed the decriminalization of victimless crimes, so that our prisons have more room for violent offenders. Another possibility discussed in this section was the equal distribution of wealth to allow youths access to better schooling and more, realistic, opportunities for the lower class to move up in society. In addition to providing possible solutions it also addressed the reasons that these solutions would not be feasible, mostly that these recommendations would create too much competition against the