ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 of The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison has four main objectives: (1) examining the exclusive use of police and prison as the response to high crime rates in the United States, (2) reviewing the “excuses” that are made for the failure to significantly reduce our high crime rate, (3) discussing the known sources of crime and thus the kinds of policies that stand a good chance of reducing crime significantly, and (4) introducing the Pyrrhic defeat theory to explain the continued existence of policies that fail to reduce crime. The subtitle of Chapter 1, in our original text, The Rich Get Richer, is “Nothing Succeeds Like Failure,” which highlights an important aspect of the larger argument: The criminal justice system is allowed to continue to fail to reduce crime because this failure benefits those with power to change the system. Crime in the streets draws people's attention away from crimes in the suites and, even more so, from the noncriminal harms that result from the actions of the well-off.
