ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 of The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison examines a variety of ways people in the United States are harmed and it finds that some of the greatest dangers to our well-being are not from acts that are labeled crimes. Readers are asked to compare the harms from crimes with the harms of certain noncriminal behavior as a step in determining whether the harsh response to criminal harms and the gentle approach to noncriminal harms represents intelligent policy. The acts that lead to these harms share many elements of criminal conduct—they are harmful acts done knowingly or recklessly—but some tend to be ignored or minimized by the criminal justice system. The inclusion of certain harmful acts within the criminal law—and the exclusion of other harmful acts—does not reflect an objective reality about “dangerous crime.” Instead, our concepts of “crime” and the “typical criminal” are socially created through the process of making and enforcing law. The criminal justice system acts as a carnival mirror that magnifies the threat of street crime while minimizing a variety of other harmful behaviors.
