The Rich get Richer and the poor get prison by Jeffery Remain, 6th ed.

Jeffrey Reiman is the William Fraser McDowell Professor of Philosophy at American University in Washington, D.C. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Queens College in 1963, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Pennsylvania State University in 1968. He was a Fulbright Scholar in India during 1966-1967. He joined the American University faculty in 1970, in the Center for the Administration of Justice (now called the Department of Justice, Law and Society of the School of Public Affairs). In addition to The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice, Dr. Reiman is the author of In Defense of Political Philosophy (1972), Justice and Modern Moral Philosophy (1990), Critical Moral Liberalism: Theory and Practice (1997), The Death Penalty: For and Against, Abortion and the Ways We Value Human Life (1999), and more than 60 articles in philosophy and criminal justice journals and anthologies. He is also coeditor, with Paul Leighton, of the anthology Criminal Justice Ethics (2001).

Authors background education support that he was already an expert in this subject.

The author's main argument was the failures of criminal justice system and the impact they have on society. He looks at this in several ways, through his Pyrrhic Defeat theory, writings on Marx and the criminal justice system and even in his work on the death penalty. Due to this they are often the subject of biases in the system, where they receive longer sentences and do not receive the same services as their counterparts in the middle and upper class. This paper will explore his theories in detail and look at how they interconnect to one another and his theories on justice.

The main reason the author write the book was that he wants to pulled from a variety of well-known sources. These sources which influenced his theory of the inadequacies of the criminal justice system include Emile Durkheim, Kai Erickson, Karl Marx and Richard Quinney. The idea that crime is functional and serves important roles for the society comes from Durkheim. The conception that public policy can be best understood as serving the interests of the rich and the powerful in a society stems from Karl Marx. The fact notion that the institutions designed to fight crime instead contribute to its existence is from Kai Erikson. Finally "the concept of the 'reality' of crimes as created in the process that runs from the definition of some acts as 'criminal' on the law to the treatment of some persons as 'criminals' by the agents of the law" (Reiman 1995:7). Using these individuals theories, he created his own, the Pyrrhic defeat theory which argues that the criminal justice system actually only fights a portion of the crime, enough only to keep it from getting out of hand, and to keep the struggle of crime prominent in people's minds, but crime is never reduced substantially or ...