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The rich get richer and the poor get prison

by Jeffrey H. Reiman

Explores the connections between class and criminal justice, starting with the definition of crimes in the lawbooks and progressing through familiar stages of the system, to show that the same pattern persists: the acts defined legally as crimes, the acts treated seriously as crimes, tend to be the acts committed by poor people, often poor nonwhite people. Harmful acts of the well-off tend rarely to be defined as crimes, and when they are so defined, tend not to be treated as serious crimes. [Preface].