And the Poor Get Prison: Economic Bias in American Criminal Justice

First, a bit of disclosure: I am not a social scientist or a scholar of any kind. Rather, I approach this book from the perspective of an informed observer of the federal criminal justice system. As a full-time SpanishEnglish court interpreter I have occasion to observe first-hand the workings of federal criminal proceedings, from arrest through sentencing. I can hardly help but notice that the overwhelming majority of defendants whom I encounter on their way to prison are poor. (Their "crimes," moreover, are usually victimless -- typically, drug offenses or illegal re-entry, i.e., returning illegally to the US after being deported, usually for a drug offense.) And the Poor Get Prison begins with an anecdote that explains the genesis of the book. Rieman and his students were conducting a thought experiment: how would you design a criminal justice system if your goal were to ensure that there would always be plenty of crime and criminals to keep the prisons full? Their model turned out to be a carbon copy of what we have, a system custom built to fail to achieve its ostensible purpose.Economic bias is built into our criminal justice system and operates at many levels: at the legislative level, where decisions are made as to what will be a crime and how it will be punished; at the enforcement level, where discretionary decisions about arrests are made; at the prosecutorial level, where charging decisions are made; and at the judicial level, where sentences are meted out. At each phase the wealthy and powerful have opportunities to avoid punishment that are not available to the poor. Starting at the legislative level, certain crimes such as nonviolent drug offenses are punished severely, while serious corporate environmental and economic crimes - which, as Reiman demonstrates, are actually far more harmful to society than the sort of street crimes that normally come to mind when one thinks of "crime" - are punished with slaps on the wrist, if at all, and are ! often treated as regulatory rather than criminal matters. In many cases the wealthy never end up facing the justice system at all for their crimes. When they do, they have access to private, retained counsel who, according to studies cited by the author, are more effective than the overworked and underfunded public defenders who are assigned to the indigent.In terms of enforcement patterns, And the Poor Get Prison describes how law enforcement targets the poor over middle and upper class offenders. He treats racial discrimination as a form of economic bias that achieves the same end as racism, since minorities are disproportionately poor.The prosecutorial and sentencing phases have further mechanims to "weed out the wealthy." The resulting criminal justice system is like a carnival mirror that projects a distorted image of reality, of who the most dangerous criminals are. Media hype and hysteria help futher distort the image. Prisons themselves, having abandoned long since any pret