The Rich Get Rich and the Poor Become Prison by Jeffrey ReimanJeffrey Reiman, author of The Rich Get Rich and the Poor Become Prison, has published for the first time his book in 1979; is now in its sixth edition and he has continued to revise it as he keeps up to date on criminal justice statistics and other trends in the system. Reiman originally wrote his book after teaching for seven years at the School of Justice (formerly the Center for the Administration of Justice), which is a multidisciplinary criminal justice education program at American University in Washington, DC. He drew heavily on what he had learned. by his colleagues at that university. Reiman is the William Fraser McDowell Professor of Philosophy at American University, where he has taught since 1970. He has written numerous books on political philosophy, criminology, and sociology. Reiman states his thesis in the Introduction. He argues that the goal of the American criminal justice system is not to eliminate crime – or even to achieve justice – but to project to people an image of the idea that the threat of crime comes from the poor. The system must “maintain” a large population of poor criminals and, to that end, must not reduce or eliminate crimes committed by the poor. When crime declines, it is not because of our criminal justice policies, but in spite of them. In testing this idea, Reiman asked his students to build a correctional system that maintained a stable and visible group of criminals, rather than eliminating or reducing crime, and they suggested the following: enact laws against drug abuse, prostitution, and gambling; give police, prosecutors and judges broad discretion in deciding who is arrested, charged and sentenced to prison; these ideas have massive opposition ready to stop any such effort. Reiman's concept of social justice is more in line with sociological theories that find systemic reasons for crime, which is quite different from the prevailing individual actor theories that are so rooted in the system. Reiman is less convincing in how he portrays the system as intentionally biased, because he makes it sound like it's an organized conspiracy. This is simply not the case. The book is provocative and contains many good ideas, including an in-depth analysis of the current criminal justice system and how that system could be changed to better represent, serve, and protect ALL Americans. Works Cited Reiman, Jeffrey. The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Go to Prison, Sixth Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001.