Jeffrey Reiman's The Rich Get Richer And The Poor Get Prison

Studies show that the United States of America has become the country with the highest crime rate throughout the world. In many instances in our country, wealthy criminals or those that commit crimes who belong to the upper class society tend to be overlooked or exempt from being punished for their crimes. However, this isn’t the case for the poorer end of the spectrum, when it comes to those less fortunate the criminal justice system tend to deem them as less adequate and their punishments usually end with jail or imprisonment. In Jeffrey Reiman’s The Rich get Richer and the Poor get Prison, he argues that the best way to understand the policies that are correlated with our criminal justice system, we must look at the Pyrrhic Defeat Model. …show more content…
This explains the fact that in our country those with the most power and those who have the ability to control and change systems are the ones who benefit the most from society. The idea of a Pyrrhic victory is based off of the idea of achieving an objective, but doing so at a high cost, thus the campaign should be deemed a failure. However, in The Rich get Richer and the Poor get Prison, this theory is turned around and is called a Pyrrhic defeat, this is where a large amount of resources are spent to reduce crime, thus the failure being a success. The catastrophe here results in an extremely high level of street crime, therefore creating a victory for the high socioeconomic status people in America because they are not considered when looking at the crime problem, thus leading to the upper class and corporate America to remain free and continue harming the less valued people of America. This is a clear example as to how fixed the United States criminal justice system truly …show more content…
If asked, most people would describe a dark skinned, male, poor grungy or dirty looking, and possibly suffering from some sort of addiction. No one would ever describe the well-groomed, white male, in a perfectly tailored suit and that is the problem. Reiman states within his book that the typical image of a criminal is poor, and that if people are poor than it is their own fault, not the fault of our system, going on to claim that those lower status individuals are in need of some sort of reform. This is my biggest issue is that America is continuing to call a war on street crimes, and but doing so this perceives the threat of crime to come from the poor instead of the large quantity of corporate criminals. Reiman states in chapter four, that in order for these biases to continue in our society, the criminal justice system must fail to reduce the crime and in result help to generate a continuous level of visible street