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Critical Criminologist

Text Box: The Rich (Still) Get Richer… Understanding Ideology, Outrage and Economic Bias

Text Box: Jeffrey Reiman American University Editor’s Note: The ASC meetings in November marked the 50th anniversary of that organization. They also marked the 20th anniversary of the publication of Jeffrey Reiman’s book, The Rich Get Richer & the Poor Get Prison, now in its 5th edition from Allyn & Bacon. A panel at the conference featured a series of papers to mark two decades of this book being in print. The following are the substantive prepared remarks given by Jeffrey Reiman at this panel. I am extremely honored to be here. I am, in addition to being honored to be here, surprised. Surprised that twenty years have passed since the original publication of The Rich Get Richer, surprised that the book seems still to be a popular text, and surprised at how little has changed with respect to the economic bias in criminal justice that the book tries to document. (Of course, I thank all of you for forcing your students to buy The Rich Get Richer year after year, thereby making me richer and — per my hypothesis — helping me stay out of prison.) Not that I thought the publication of The Rich Get Richer would bring about massive social change (though my mother still wonders why the President hasn’t offered me a cabinet-level job to fix the criminal justice system). Rather it occurs to me that my book was originally published at a time when many writers were bringing social science research to bear on the economic bias in the criminal justice system. Indeed, not many years before, the Johnson crime commission report, “The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society,” had emphasized the way in which the criminal justice system systematically focused on the poor and powerless in our society, writing, in language that now seems almost quaint: “The offender at the end of the road in prison is likely to be a member of the lowest social and economic groups in the country.” But for all this attention and documentation, little has changed--on some accounts things have gotten worse. Of course, the mechanisms of economic bias have changed. Now we have sentencing guidelines the effect of which is that judges no longer have the discretion with which to favor well-off

Text Box: folks — instead that is now left to prosecutors whose discretionary decisions about charging are far harder to monitor, happening as they do, not in open court, but behind closed doors. And this is not to mention the bias that is built into the sentencing guidelines themselves (and the extremely harsh minimum sentences that often accompany them), such as the famous gap between the penalty for crack cocaine and that for powder. Likewise, as police have hopefully become less and less racist in their personal outlooks, the war on drugs has led to massive police presence in the poorest sections of our cities, with the inevitable effect that poor drug sellers continue to be arrested and imprisoned in great numbers, while it is obvious that the drug trade reaches far beyond the inner city. Economic bias is still with us. What has changed is that the attention and concern that was once focused on economic bias as a serious problem that threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the criminal justice system has steadily diminished. It was easy to find material for the first edition of The Rich Get Richer because the social science journals were chock full of studies showing economic bias in criminal justice; but as the years have passed, with each succeeding revision of the book, I have found the studies decreasing in number and eventually dwindling to a trickle. At the same time, I have yet to find a major criminology textbook that even has an index entry on economic status or class; the FBI Index gives no information of the economic class of arrestees for various crimes, the Bureau of Prisons reports give only scant information on the pre-incarceration economic situation of current inmates, the Victimization Reports give some gross categorization of victimization by household income but of course nothing about that of the victimizers, and so on. So we have on one hand a continuation — some times even an aggravation — of economic bias, and, on the other hand, a diminution of studies by social scientists (not to mention an unbroken silence among politicians and other leaders) about that economic bias. I think that there is a lesson to be learned here about the power of ideology and the way in which it works. It is commonly thought that ideology is a system of false beliefs. But I think that this is a mistaken view, for several reasons. First, it is, I think, a plain fact that people’s judgments are generally rational in light of their experience and normally correct. Any serious doubt of this flies in the face of reality, but