What Are the Alternatives?

The book The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison raised an interesting question in my mind. It was humorous to read about how the author's students attempted to design a criminal justice system to maintain a class of criminals, and it turned out to be almost exactly what we have in place. All of the points were well made, however I do think there are a few flaws in the argument. The students did a great job of making the flaws in ours apparent, but they failed to provide an alternative. As I thought about this, I did the most logical thing I could think of. If what we are doing now is wrong, then shouldn't the opposite be right? This was not the case.

The first paragraph mentioned having laws against gambling, drugs, and prostitution. It said that many people would be criminals for what they regarded as normal behavior. The other side however, is that most of this behavior does in fact harm people. The main problem here is that who gets to decide what "normal" behavior is. Why is or isn't it normal to hire a prostitute? The same question could be asked of murder. Undoubtedly some people out there have no moral problems with murder. This is a scenario in which our current laws are flawed; yet there isn't necessarily a better solution. We are forced to set a certain standard of behavior in order to protect the majority of people, even if that causes others to stay in the criminal justice system.

The second paragraph discusses the fact that because of the way our judicial system is set up, most criminals know several others who committed the same crime but were not caught, leading them to have rage. Unfortunately once again it is impossible to catch everyone. It is also impossible to tailor the sentencing and type of punishment to individuals any more than we already do. The book implies that we want the criminals to feel more socially acceptable. This is a difficult task to accomplish when the people you are dealing with people who did the opposite of what is socially acceptable to get in prison in the first place.