ABSTRACT
The criminal justice system actually fails in three ways: It fails to substantially reduce crime; to treat as crimes harmful acts of the well-off; and to eliminate bias against the poor in arrest, conviction, and sentencing. This chapter argues that this happens because the current system’s failure produces benefits for the wealthy in America. A conspiracy theory would argue that the rich and the powerful, seeing the benefits to be derived from the failure of criminal justice, consciously set out to use their wealth and power to make it fail. To understand how the Pyrrhic defeat theory explains the current shape of our failing criminal justice policy, note that this failure is really three failures that work together. The Pyrrhic defeat theory aims to explain the persistence of this failing criminal justice policy rather than its origins. Ideology involves ideas that distort reality in ways that hide society’s injustices and thus secure uncritical allegiance to the existing social order.
