The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice

Illustrates the issue of economic inequality within the American justice system.

The best-selling text, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prisoncontends that the criminal justice system is biased against the poor from start to finish. The authors argue that even before the process of arrest, trial, and sentencing, the system is biased against the poor in what it chooses to treat as crime.

The authors show that numerous acts of the well-off--such as their refusal to make workplaces safe, refusal to curtail deadly pollution, promotion of unnecessary surgery, and prescriptions for unnecessary drugs--cause as much harm as the acts of the poor that are treated as crimes. However, the dangerous acts of the well-off are almost never treated as crimes, and when they are, they are almost never treated as severely as the crimes of the poor. Not only does the criminal justice system fail to protect against the harmful acts of well-off people, it also fails to remedy the causes of crime, such as poverty. This results in a large population of poor criminals in our prisons and in our media. The authors contend that the idea of crime as a work of the poor serves the interests of the rich and powerful while conveying a misleading notion that the real threat to Americans comes from the bottom of society rather than the top.

Learning Goals

Upon completing this book, readers will be able to:

• Examine the criminal justice system through the lens of the poor.
• Understand that much of what goes on in the criminal justice system violates one’s own sense of fairness.
• Morally evaluate the criminal justice system’s failures.
• Identify the type of legislature that is biased against the poor.

Note: MySearchLab with eText does not come automatically packed with this text. To purchase MySearchLab with eText, please visitwww.mysearchlab.com or you can purchase a ValuePack of the text + MySearchLab with eText (at no additional cost): ValuePack ISBN-10: 0205896103 / ValuePack ISBN-13: 9780205896103.

Description

This best-selling text, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, eighth edition, examines the premise that the criminal justice system is biased against the poor from start to finish: from the definition of what constitutes a crime through the process of arrest, trial, and sentencing.

The author argues that actions of well-off people, such as refusal to make workplaces safe, refusal to curtail deadly pollution, promotion of unnecessary surgery, and prescriptions for unnecessary drugs, cause occupational and environmental hazards to innocent members of the public and produce just as much death, destruction, and financial loss as so-called crimes of the poor. However, these acts of the well-off are rarely treated as crimes, and when they are, they are never treated as severely as crimes of the poor.

As with every edition, this text has been thoroughly revised. Some of the latest revisions include the following:

*        Current statistics on criminal and noncriminal harms

*        New section at the end of Chapter 1, “A Word about Foucault”

*        Also in Chapter 1, a brief comment on Rawls’s theory of justice added to the section on poverty as a known cause of crime

*         New appendix, “Between Philosophy and Criminology,” argues that criminology has a special need for philosophical reflection, and states the philosophical assumptions underlying The Rich Get Richer