The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison

Thinking Critically About Class and Criminal Justice

Jeffrey Reiman, Paul Leighton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000063349
• Edition: 12
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

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 aren't 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 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 morally—and they to 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 dangerous—but not criminal—corporate 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

CHAPTER 1

Crime Control in America

Nothing Succeeds Like Failure

Is it crime and punishment that go hand in hand? Or does punishment feed the crime that plagues our land?

—Robert Johnson, A Zoo Near You^*

Failure is in the eye of the beholder.

—Anonymous

Chapter 1 has three main objectives: 1) to examine the exclusive focus on police and prison that characterizes America’s response to its high crime rate and show the limited role that police and prisons have played in reducing street crime; 2) to review the “excuses” that are made for our high crime rates, and show how we choose to have the crime rates we do; and 3) to outline the Pyrrhic defeat theory that explains the continued existence of high crime rates after decades of policies that fail to reduce crime. The subtitle of Chapter 1, “Nothing Succeeds Like Failure,” highlights an important aspect of the larger argument: The criminal justice system is failing even if crime rates are down from all-time highs. “Tough on crime” policies had little to do with the reduction in crime rates, and mass incarceration even had some “backfire” effects that promoted crime. Crime rates in the U.S. are still high compared to other developed countries, even though they are now down to rates not experienced since the 1960s when crime was seen as an alarming problem. Policies targeting sources of crime (inequality, guns, prison, drug policy), and evidence-based policies about what works to reduce crime, have not been seriously considered. Ultimately, American criminal justice policy makes more sense if we look at the system as wanting to have high crime rates—there are some for whom “crime pays” and for whom the system’s failure is a success.

*By permission of BleakHouse Publishing.

The Failure of Tough on Crime

In the last 60 years, crime rates have mostly gone up until the 1990s, and then down substantially. Current crime rates now are similar to what they were in the early 1960s, in spite of various “tough on crime” proposals that propelled the U.S. into “the largest prison expansion the world has ever known.”¹ From 1980 to 2000, the U.S. built more prisons than it had in all the rest of its history,² creating what has been called an incarceration binge, mass incarceration, hyperincarceration, and a Plague of Prisons.³ The policies that led to the U.S. having the highest incarceration rate in the world contributed little to lowering crime rates, but it came at an enormous financial cost, heightened racial inequality and tensions–and it added to a variety of social problems, such as the breakdown of inner-city communities. The getting “tough on crime” rhetoric now has been tempered with discussions about criminal justice reform, but actual reform is infrequent and does little to undo the “four-decade mean season in Corrections.”⁴ The persistence and legacy of this failed policy requires examination.

In response to rising crime rates during the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson proposed addressing the causes of crime with policies, such as antipoverty and economic opportunity programs, that spread the benefits of America’s successful economy to more citizens. Programs that addressed social inequality were considered to be anti-crime programs because they attacked crime’s “root causes.” Johnson declared:

There is something mighty wrong when a candidate for the highest office bemoans violence in the streets but votes against the war on poverty, votes against the Civil Rights Act, and votes against major educational bills that come before him.⁵

President Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign rejected Johnson’s strategy, and in his 1970 State of the Union message, Nixon stated: “We must declare and win the war against the criminal elements which increasingly threaten our cities, our homes, and our lives.”⁶ The four years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency were an exception to the “tough on crime” agenda—for example, he proposed eliminating penalties for possession of less than one ounce of marijuana.⁷ But the “get tough” pattern resumed with Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980, including two major bills expanding mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes. Under President Bush (I) in 1992, the Department of Justice released The Case for More Incarceration, with then-Attorney General William P. Barr writing that “prison works” and urging tougher sentencing.⁸

During the 20 years when crime rates were increasing, politicians never took responsibility for it. Rather than questioning whether getting tough was effective, they played to voters’ fears by advocating “law and order” in many forms: more police, harsher sentences, mandatory minimums, three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws (and then expanding the offenses that counted as strikes), and the increased use of capital punishment. When crime rates started to decline, however, politicians jumped to claim credit. This is “a version of ‘heads I win, tails you lose,’ in which decreases in crime are evidence that hard-line punishments work, whereas increases are evidence that they are needed.”⁹

Bill Clinton’s campaign and presidency happened as the crime rate peaked and then started to decline, so he continued the 20-year unquestioned assumption that tough on crime was necessary and started 30 years of claims that the policies worked to decrease crime. While campaigning, Clinton proposed hiring 100,000 police officers in an effort to get the endorsement of police organizations, and counter perceptions that he might be soft on crime. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 authorized the hiring of 100,000 officers, toughened sentences, provided $10 billion for prison construction, incentivized states to toughen sentencing laws, and created 60 new death penalty offenses. When signing the bill, Clinton called it a “great law, the toughest and smartest crime bill in our history.”¹⁰

Although crime rates dropped noticeably for two years before the crime bill, President Clinton took credit for declining crime rates.¹¹ He claimed that putting 100,000 new police on the street “played a big role in [the] recent crime drop,” but one analysis noted that “Clinton has won funding for 44,000 officers; [of whom] 20,000 are on the beat so far. Experts say that number could not have reduced crime much.”¹² With officers working in shifts, taking vacations, and so on, it requires at least five officers to provide one officer on the street, around the clock, for a whole year.¹³

Further, National Academy of Sciences panels in 1978 and 1993 found there was a lack of evidence to support the assumption that harsher punishments deter crime. “Despite those nearly unanimous findings, during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s the U.S. Congress and every state enacted laws calling for mandatory minimum sentences.”¹⁴

Untroubled by such facts, President Clinton again took credit for the continued decline in crime rates the next year, 1997, saying that 100,000 new officers and “tough new penalties on the books.... This approach is working.” In response to crime “dropping for the fifth year in a row,” Clinton said: “Now that we’ve finally turned crime on the run, we have to redouble ...