Reiman's "The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison"

Paper Summary:

This paper briefly examines Reiman's book which keeps up on criminal justice statistics and other trends in the system. The thesis of the book is that the goal of the American criminal justice system is not to eliminate crime or even to achieve justice but to project to the people an image of the idea that the threat of crime is a threat from the poor. The system must therefore maintain a large population of poor criminals, and to this end, it must not eliminate the crime that poor people commit or even reduce the number of those crimes to any great extent.

From the Paper:

"In the chapter "Crime Control in America," Reiman suggests that the system has been designed to fail. Imprisoning drug offenders, for instance, does nothing to reduce the number of rug offenders in society because they are immediately replaced. The decline in violent crime is more attributable to demographic changes than to enforcement efforts. Most of the decline in crime of all sorts takes place because of forces beyond the control of the criminal justice systems. Reiman also says we could reduce crime if we wanted to do so and that four excuses given are not really answers to the problem at all but merely excuses to explain why the system fails. We know the causes of crime--poverty, prisons, and drugs--yet we do nothing to change how these things operate, such as banning guns and decriminalizing drugs."

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