Jeffrey Reiman

Jeffrey Reiman-
A Critical Criminologist

By Kristen Scully
Florida State University

Jeffrey Reiman emphasizes 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. He believes that the system is designed to fail and those in power benefit from this failure. The poor ion the other hand is not being helped by these laws, but have no power to change them. 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.

Before we go in depth with Reiman’s theories, it is important to know a little of his background. Jeffrey Reiman was born in Brooklyn, New York, received his BA in 1965 at Queens College and his Ph.D. in philosophy at Penn State in 1968. He traveled and studied in India in 1966-1967 on a Fulbright Scholarship. He joined the faculty of the American University in 1970 in the Center for Administration of Justice (now called the Department of Justice, Law and Society of the School of Public Affairs). After Several years of holding a joint appointment in the Justice Program and the Department of Philosophy and Religion, he joined the Philosophy Department full time in 1988. In 1990, he became the William Fraser McDowell professor of Philosophy. He has several books in print including The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Crime, and Criminal Justice, In Defense of Political Philosophy and Justice and Modern Moral Philosophy. He also has numerous articles in philosophy and criminal justice journals and anthologies.

Jeffrey Reiman is not a criminologist, but a philosopher who likes to write about the Criminal Justice System. Reiman views the notion of justice, one of his primary topics as a fundamental moral principle ( O’Railly-Meacock 1997:94). He believes everybody is entitled to justice, regardless of what social structure they are from and each individual inequalities must be reduced (Reiman, 1990:2-3). He has focused continuously on his Pyrrhic Defeat theory, which states that the Criminal Justice System is designed to fail. Other Areas of interest to him are the death penalty and the Marxian Critique of Criminal Justice. His concepts of justice will be shown through out these theories. Each will be explained and discussed below.

Pyrrhic Defeat Theory

In writing his first publication of The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison in 1979, Reiman 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 eliminated. Therefore the criminal justice system benefits those in power, while making it look like all crime is the work of the poor (Reiman 1995:4-5).

Reiman argues three points to support his theory:

1. Society fails to protect people from the crimes they fear by refusing to alleviate the poverty that breeds them.
2. The criminal justice system fails to protect people from the most serious dangers by failing to define the dangerous acts of those who are well off as crimes and by failing to enforce the law vigorously against the well to do when they commit acts that are defined as crimes.
3. By virtue of these and other failures, the criminal justice system succeeds in creating the image that crime is almost exclusively the work of the poor, an image that serves the interests of the powerful (Reiman 1995: 8-9).

These points will be supported in the following discussion about his Pyrrhic defeat theory. In order to support his statements, he claims that the system is designed to fail and looks at everything from this angle.

The first attempt at supporting his theory is the excuses given for this failure. The first excuse is that society is too soft on crime. Reiman argues that we are no softer than any other modern nation. We are the only western nation to still use the death penalty and if one looks at our crime rates and the rate of incarceration, the United States is still higher than any other modern nation (Reiman 1995: 18-19). The second excuse is that Crime is an inescapable companion of any complex populous industrialized society. To this Reiman replies that other highly industrialized countries such as Japan have crime rates that are not only lower than ours, but also do not accelerate as such a rapid rate as ours do. This excuse also does not account for the striking difference in crime rates within our own modern complex populous urbanized nation. A comparison of crime rates for standard metropolitan statistical areas reveals a striking lack of correlation between crime rate and population size. See table 1. Below

	Table 1. Large Cities by Population Density and Crime Rates
(per 100,000 population)
City and Population per Square Mile		Overall Crime Rank and Rate	Violent Crime Rank and Rate	Property Crime Rank and Rate
New York City (23,701)		7^th 9,236	6^th 2,318	9^th 6,918
Philadelphia (11,734)		10^th 6,835	8^th 1,408	10^th 5,427
Miami (10,080)		1^st 18,394	1^st 4,252	1^st 14,142
Washington, D.C. (9,883)		4^th 10,756	5^th 2,452	5^th 8,303
Detroit (7,410)		3^rd 12,263	3^rd 2,727	3^rd 9,536
Los Angeles (7,428)		6^th 9,730	4^th 2,526	7^th 7,204
Cleveland (6,537)		9^th 8,945	7^th 1,832	8^th 7,113
Milwaukee		8^th	10^th	6^th
(6,537)		9,044	979	8,065
Phoenix (2,342)		5^th 9,958	9^th 1,106	4^th 8,853
Kansas City(Mo.) (1,397)		2^nd 13,198	2^nd 2,833	2^nd 10,366
Source:Statabst-1992, Table 38, pp. 35-37; UCR 1991, pp 84-105 in Reiman 1995:21 Note: The rates and rankings are calculated by using UCR data for the cities themselves, not the metropolitan areas.

Therefore Reiman concludes that the variation in crime rates between modern cities and nations is proof that the extent of crime is not a simple consequence of urbanization and must be explained by other differences (Reiman, 1995:19-22). The third excuse is that crime can be attributed to young people. Although youngsters do show a disproportionality in crime statistics, crime rates have grown faster than either the absolute number of young people or the percentage for the population. Reiman states that the percentage of young people in the population in 1990 was only slightly higher than that in 1960, yet the crime rate in 1990 was five times higher then that of 1960. Therefore, although the number of young individuals in the population has an important effect on crime rates, in cannot fully explain the statistics away. Something other than their youth or their number must explain why these youths are committing more crimes than youths in other periods did (Reiman, 1995:22-25). The final reason that we cannot reduce crime is that we don’t know how. Reiman addresses this by mentioning everything we do know about crime. We know that poverty, slums and unemployment are sources of street crime. We know that these things are a source of crime, even if we do not know how it causes crime- yet we do virtually nothing to improve the life chances of the vast majority of the inner city poor. We know that unemployment has gone up and down, yet it has remained steady at the bottom of society, which is considerably worse than the national average. Reiman claims that prison produces more crime than it cures. 70 percent of the inmates in the nation’s prisons are not there for the first time (Reiman 1995:29). These prisoners once on the outside are rarely able to find a job as they are burdened with the label of criminal, thus unable to find opportunities for noncriminal employment. Finally, Reiman says we know that the United States has an enormous drug abuse and addiction problem. Reiman focuses on heroin claiming that we know treating the possession of heroin as a criminal offense produces more crime than it prevents, once deprived the addict experiences a painful physical need for the drug and must steal six times the amount of his or her habit due to the low prices of fences. We have little evidence that heroin is a dangerous drug, it causes more damage than by smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor. By not legalizing this and other drugs, our society is steadfastly refusing to provide heroin through legal sources than for approximately a half a million individuals on the streets, translates a physical need for a drug into a physical need to steal billions of dollars worth of property a year. In sum Reiman states that

we have an antidrug policy that is failing at its own goals and succeeding only in adding to crime. First, there are the heroin and crack addicts, who must steal to support their habit. Then, there are the drug merchants who are offered fabulous incentives to provide illicit substances to a willing body of consumers. This in turn contributes to the high rate of inner-city murders and other violence as drug gangs battle for the enormous sums of money available. Next, there are the law enforcement officials who, after risking their lives for low salaries, are corrupted by nearly irresistible amounts of money. Finally, there are the otherwise law-abiding citizens who are made criminals because they use cocaine, a drug less harmful than tobacco, and those who are made criminals because they use marijuana, a drug that is safer than alcohol and less deadly than aspirin… All this occurring at a time when there is increasing evidence that what does work to reduce substance abuse is public education (Reiman 1995:37).

Reiman feels therefore that the criminal justice system is not acting on the knowledge that they have to reduce crime and the threats of society. The entire process including lawmaking to law enforcement has done little or nothing to reduce the enormous amount of crime that plagues our society (Remain 1995 25-38).

The next stage of his theory claims that the American criminal justice system is a mirror that shows a distorted image of the dangers that threaten us, an image created more by the shape of the mirror than by the reality reflected. Reiman calls this the carnival mirror (Reiman 1995:51). This is created by the fact that the label "crime" is not used in America to name all or the worst crimes or actions that cause misery and suffering to American (Reiman 1995:49). Reiman starts this argument by naming the typical criminal, he is a he, a youth, black, urban and poor. This is the image of a criminal that most Americans have in their mind if asked. Individuals, no matter how dangerous would not end up in the justice system if it had not been for the laws made by the legislature labeling those acts as criminal. That is where the label of criminal starts. It then proceeds to being arrested, taken to station, having a court date and so forth. It is these decisions that create the shape of the reality we see through the mirror. Therefore Reiman concludes that the criminal justice system does not simply "reflect the reality of crime; it has a hand in creating the reality we see" (Reiman 1995: 55). If individuals believe that the carnival mirror is a true mirror, if they believe the criminal justice system simply reacts to the gravest threats to their well-being, these individuals come to believe that whatever is the target of the criminal justice system must be the greatest threat to their well-being (Reiman 1995:56).

Reiman emphasizes that humans are responsible for the shape of crime. He has five hypothesis focusing the attention on whom make these decisions as to what is labeled crime. They are as follows:

Of the Decisions of Legislators: That the definitions of crime in the criminal law do not reflect the only or the most dangerous of antisocial behavior.
Of the Decisions of Police and Prosecutors: That the decisions on whom to arrest or charge do not reflect the only or the most dangerous behaviors legally defined as "criminal."
Of the Decisions of Juries and Judges: That criminal convictions do not reflect the only or the most dangerous individuals among those arrested and charged.
Of the Decisions of Sentencing Judges: That sentencing decisions do not reflect the goal of protecting society from the only or the most dangerous of those convicted by meting out punishments proportionate to the harmfulness of the crime committed.
Of All These Decisions Taken Together: That what criminal justice policy decisions (in hypotheses 1 to 4) do reflect is the implicit identification of crime with the dangerous acts of the poor (Reiman 1995:59).

These five hypotheses are a large component of the Pyrrhic defeat theory. To support these five hypothesizes Reiman looks at crimes by other names that are not necessarily one on one harms that our system focuses on, but indirect harm caused by businesses and harms one might not suspect. His point is that because we accept the belief encouraged by our political statements about crime and the media’s portrayal of crime- the model of crime where one person is trying to harm another, we accept a legal system that leaves us unprotected against much greater threats to our lives and well-beings than those by the typical criminal (Reiman 1995:61).

Public Defenders insist that given their limited resources, the political and legal institutions that are in place are the best possible and that the legal system should occupy itself with one-on-one harm. The defenders also argue that crimes identified by the criminal justice system are imposed on their victims against their will, but those that are indirect, such as occupational hazards are accepted by the victims when they take the job. Reiman answers these critiques, emphasizing that a crime no matter how it is done is still a crime, specifically when the culprits know that it will cause danger. Individuals knowingly, recklessly or negligently make decisions in the work place. They know when they make these decisions that risks may be involved. The workers on the other hand, may not know of these risks, thus are not consenting to these crimes. He feels regardless of if the crime was intentional, harm was still incurred, therefore it should be labeled a crime and finally that a crime ought to be a crime regardless of if it was done purely in a self interested way or as a consequence of a legitimate and socially productive endeavor (Reiman 1995:63-69).

Reiman mentions these "other dangers to us," including Occupational Injury, unnecessary surgery and chemical warfare which includes pollution, cigarette smoking and food additives. His goal is to show that the harm produced by some type of noncriminal act is comparable to the harm produced by any serious crime Occupational Injury can consist of poor working conditions. He does this by comparing occupational disease to the deaths and injuries to those deaths and injuries caused by acts labeled as criminal. He notes that the risk of occupational risk disease and death falls only on members of the labor force, whereas the risk of crime falls on the whole population. Because of this, he cuts the number of crimes in half. He uses what he calls conservative figures for the occupational disease he uses estimates from the Bureau of labor Statistics of the US Department of labor, plus uses some other sources as he feels necessary¹. His first estimates are in Table 2 below.

Table 2.

	Occupational Disease	Crime (halved)
Death	25,000	12,000
Other physical harm	150,000	500,000

Reiman, 1995 p 73

The chart above lists only the death and disease from occupational injury. They do not include death and disease from work-related injuries. Including these figures brings the figures much higher. He uses figures from the National Safety Council reported in 1991. Therefore table 3 shows a more accurate picture of occupational disease and work related injuries.

Table 3.

	Occupational Disease	Crime (halved)
Death	34,600	12,000
Other physical harm	1,850,000	500,000
		Reiman, 1995 p 74

Reiman mentions that occupational injury causes harm many years after the original encounter, is caused by poor working conditions. He feels that if "quotas were set with an eye to keeping work at a safe pace rather than to keeping the production-to0wages ratio as high as possible, it might be more reasonable to expect workers to take the time to be careful" (Reiman 1995:75). For every three American citizens murdered by thugs, at least four American workers are killed by the recklessness of their bosses and the indifference of their government (Reiman 1995:77).

The healthcare industry is another area where Reiman believes that lives are being threatened. He believes that surgeries are being conducted unnecessarily to make profits, causing 15,000 deaths a year (Reiman 1995: 77). Drug companies have reported keeping test results, thus creating deaths and life-threatening adverse drug reactions. In addition to the health industry the other cause of harm he mentions is chemical warfare. He claims that those who live need chemical industry are more likely to get cancer. The EPA does not have enough personnel to even begin enforcing its guidelines. The fact that cigarette smoking is legal and there is a full scale-war on heroin while cigarette smoking has been linked to severe health risks continues to be questioned. In addition the EPA has released information on the dangers second hand smoke. While this information is being distributed, congress has accepted some $9.3 million in campaign contributions form the tobacco companies in the past three decades. The American public in addition consumes one pound of food additives per year (Reiman 1995:84). The figures mentioned at least must make individuals think of the dangers that appear to go unpunished, or when punished receive leniency compared to those acts termed criminal.

Finally Reiman again mentions the fact that poverty is linked to crime and those living in poverty have substandard health. He believes that poverty exists in a wealth society because we allow it to exist (Reiman 1995:86). He concludes that "poverty hurts, injures and kills, just like crime. A society that could remedy its poverty but does not is an accomplice in crime" (Reiman 1995:89).

Therefore, the workplace, medical profession and the air we breath and the poverty we refuse to rectify lead to far more human suffering, far more death and disability, and take far more dollars form our pockets than the murders, aggravated assaults, and thefts reported annually by the FBI. What is more, this human suffering can be preventable (Reiman 1995:89).

Therefore, the criminal justice system is a carnival mirror that distorts the true dangers to society.

The next step to proving his theory is to display how the justice system unfairly weeds out the well-to do, so that tat the end of the road in prison, the vast majority of those found there come from the lower class. At this point it is important to mention that Reiman does not discuss racial bias, because he feels it is better stated as economic bias, as there are many similarities with everyone at the bottom of the social scale. For the same criminal behavior, the poor are more likely to be arrested; if arrested, they are more likely to be charged; if charged more likely to be convicted, if convicted, more likely to be sentenced to prison and if sentenced, more likely to be given longer prison terms then members of the middle and upper class (Reiman 1995:101). Self-report surveys have demonstrated that youth of all economic classes commit the same crimes. He cites Terrance Thornberry as having found among boys arrested with equally serious offenses and who had similar prior offense records, police were more likely to refer the lower class youths than the more affluent ones to the juvenile court (Reiman, 1995:107). Therefore the weeding out of the wealthy starts at the very entrance to the criminal justice system: The decision as to whom to investigate and press charges in not always make simply on the basis of the offense committed. The poor are stuck with a double-edged sword,

not only are the poor arrested and charged our of proportion to their numbers for the kinds of crimes poor people generally commit- burglary, robbery, assault and so forth- but when we reach the kinds of crimes poor people almost never have the opportunity to commit, such as antitrust violations, industrial safety violations, embezzlement and serious tax evasion, the criminal justice system shows increasingly benign and merciful face (Reiman 1995:109).

Reiman briefly discusses the cost of white-collar crime. These individuals are rarely charged and when charged, done so in a much friendlier way. IT is very widespread, probably much more than the crimes of the poor. Table 4 shows the difference in sentencing procedures between crimes of the poor and crimes of the affluent.

Table 4

Sentences for Different Classes of Crime
	Percent Sentenced to Prison	Average Sentence (in months)	Average Time served (in months)
Crimes of the Poor
Robbery	99%	101.1	60.2
Burglary	82%	62.8	26.0
Larceny/theft	39%	17.9	15.2

Crimes of the Affluent
Fraud^a	48%	22.2	15.6
Tax Law violation^b	43%	25.2	11.6
Embezzlement	31%	15.7	11.0
Source: Sourcebook=1992(compiled from tables 5.20, 5.22, 5.37) in Reiman, 1995 p 125
^a Does not include tax fraud b Included tax fraud

In the adjudication process, Reiman believes that only two things should count, whether the accused is guilty and whether it can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Unfortunately, two more factors play an important role. They are the ability of the accused to be free on bail and the second is access to legal counsel able to devote adequate time and effort to the case (Reiman 1995:114). Individuals not released on bail cannot help with their defense by seeking out witnesses and evidence. In addition to this, the court will often offer a deal to those who have been in jail waiting trail. If they plead guilty to the crime, they will only be sentenced to the time they have already served and then get to go home. This pushes them toward a guilty plea so as not to have to stand trial and risk spending more time in jail, but it increases guilty pleas and results in being labeled a criminal (Reiman 1995: 115). With the issue of legal counsel, individuals who have assigned lawyers or public defenders are not given lawyers who have an adequate amount of time to give to their case. These lawyers are overbooked and cannot focus on this one case like private lawyer can. Public defenders achieved either dismissal of charges or finding of not guilty in 11.4 percent of indictments the handled and private attorneys go their clients off the hood in 56 percent of their cases (Reiman 1995: 117). Reiman surmises that regardless of what fraction of crimes are committed by the poor, the criminal justice system is distorted so that an even greater fraction of those convicted will be poor (Reiman 1995:117). The same pattern is true for sentencing. For individuals guilty of similar offenses and with similar prior records, unemployed defendants were more likely to be incarcerated while awaiting trial and for longer periods than employed defendants (Chiricos and Bales in Reiman, 1995:119-120).

Reiman sums up the fact that the poor are more likely to get prison sentences by stating that the criminal justice system has a triple bias against the poor.

1. Economic class bias between harmful acts as to which get labeled crimes and which are treated as regulatory matters.
2. There is economic class bias between crimes. The crimes that poor people are likely to commit carry harsher sentences than the crimes in the suites committed by the well to do.
3. Among defendants convicted of the same crimes, the poor receive less probation and more years of confinement than well-off defendants, assuring us once again that the vast majority of those put behind bars are from the lowest social and economic classes in the nation (Reiman 1995: 127).

Reiman then asks who is winning the losing war on crime. He claims the criminal justice system fails in three ways.

Failure to implement policies that stand a good chance of reducing crime and the harm it causes.
There is a failure to identify as crimes the harmful acts of the rich and powerful.
There is a failure to eliminate economic bias in the greater chance than better-off people of being arrested, charged, convicted and penalized for committing the acts that are treated as crime (Reiman 1995 149-150).

The Pyrrhic defeat theory then tries to explain this systems persistence, rather than its origin. This is best done when looking at Reiman’s concept of historical inertia. The historical inertia explanation argues that current criminal justice policy persists because if fails in a way that does not five rise to an effective demand for change for two reasons.

This failing system provides benefits for those with the power to make changes, while it imposes costs on those without such power.
Because the criminal justice system shapes the public’s conception of what is dangerous, it creates the impression that the harm it is fighting are the real threats to society- thus even when people see that the system is less than a roaring success, they generally do no more than demand some more of the same: more police, more prisons, longer prison sentencing (Reiman, 1995: 151).

The effect of these messages than is to funnel the discontent of the middle class American into hostility toward and fear of the poor. It leads Americans to ignore the way in which they are injured and robbed by the acts of the affluent and leads them to demand harsher doses of law and order aimed mainly at the lower class. Those who suffer most from the failure to reduce crime are not in a position to change criminal justice policy. Those who are in position to change the policy are not seriously harmed by it, but are in fact helped by it (Reiman 1995: 150-156). Thus the criminal justice system "focuses moral condemnation on individuals and deflects it away from the social order that may have either violated the individual’s rights or literally pushed him or her to the brink of crime" (Reiman, 1995:157).

To explain crime, Reiman takes from Cloward and Ohlin and emphasizes the impact of the American dream and few legitimate opportunities to obtain it. He says, "Crime is a means by which people who believe in the American dream pursue it, when they find traditional routes barred" (Reiman, 1995: 158). Because these universal goals are urged to encourage a competition to select the vest, there are necessarily fewer openings than seekers. Also,

because those who achieve success are in a particularly good position to exploit their success to make access for their own children easier, the competition is rigged to work in favor of the middle and upper classes. As a result, many lower class persons are the victims of a contradiction between the goals toward which they have been led to orient themselves and socially structured mans of striving for these goals (Reiman, 1995: 158-159)

Therefore, by painting this picture that the greatest threats to the middle class come form those below them on the economic ladder, the middle class doe not focus their attention on those above them on the ladder who area actually causing them more harm (Reiman, 1995: 161). Thus in order to rehabilitate the criminal justice system in America Reiman has proposed ways to protect society and the promote justice. They are as follows:

Protecting Society

1. We must put an end to the crime-producing poverty in our midst- investing in our inner cities and providing high-quality education, job-training, and jobs for the unemployed will give us more productive citizens with a stake in playing by the rules.

2. Let the crime fit the harm and the punishment fit the crime- we must make new and clear laws against imposing certain dangers on workers and citizens generally and then hold people to these laws no matter what the class standing.

3. We must legalize the production and sale of illicit drugs and treat addiction as a medical problem.

4. We must develop correctional programs that promote rather than undermine personal responsibility and we must offer ex-offenders real preparation and a real opportunity to make it as law-abiding citizens- they must be prepared for real life when they are released.

5. We must enact and vigorously enforce stringent gun controls.

Promoting Justice

We must narrow the range in which police officers, prosecutors and judges exercise the discretion and we must develop procedures to hold them accountable to the public for the fairness and reasonableness of their decisions.

We must transform the equal tight to counsel into the right to equal counsel as far as it is possible.

We must establish a more just distribution of wealth and income and make equal opportunity a reality for all Americans.

Through these suggestions Reiman hopes that some of the biases in the system will be lessened. That people will be treated fairly with in the system regardless of their social standing and that the American public will be aware of the true dangers that they face. Therefore by looking at the Pyrrhic defeat theory, combined with his historical inertia explanation and his statement that the system is designed to fail, Reiman calls for these changes in the system.

Reiman critiques himself in his book and offers explanations for his choices. Some of these critiques include using the UCR reports for statistics, the harms of legalizing drugs and sounding like he does not feel criminals, specifically the poor should be sentenced to prison. To start off, Reiman chooses the UCR data because he feels it bests represents the violent crimes, crimes that are not often under-reported to a large degree. He argues for legalizing such drugs as marijuana, cocaine and heroin, as they are not as harmful as nicotine, yet that is available to the public. He feels the results of not legalizing drugs are too severe. As for believing that the poor should not be sent to prison, he disagrees. He feels they are guilty for their crimes, but they should be punished no more harshly than anyone else for the same crimes.

This theory began in 1979 and is still prevalent today. The book will be coming out in its sixth edition soon. Five editions have already been published. He is mentioned in most criminology textbooks as a critical criminologist, sometimes called a conflict criminologist (Hagan,1994:197-198, 543; Pfohl, 1994:489-490 and Lilly et al. 1995:171). He is mentioned in these textbooks for his work on the Pyrrhic defeat theory, but he is also known for his other works.

The Death Penalty

Reiman believes that the death penalty is a reasonable punishment for some individuals, but he feels the death penalty should not be used in today’s society. According to some, in order to argue for abolition f the death penalty, one must prove either that no act, however horrible, justifies the death penalty, or that if capital punishment were found to deter murder more effectively than life imprisonment, we should still prefer to preserve the life of a convicted murderer rather than the lives of innocent victim, even if it wee certain that these victims would be spared if the murderer were execute (van den Haag in Reiman in Simmons et al, 1995: 277). Reiman believes these two claims cannot be proven true, so therefore, one must peed the case for abolition of the death penalty while accepting that for certain cases the death penalty may still by rightly applied. Reiman claims that lex talionis, an eye for an eye, is a form of retributivism. He compares this to the golden rule. In sum he concludes that The "equality and rationality of persons implies that an offender deserves and his victim has the right to impose suffering on the offender equal to that which he imposed on the victim" (Reiman in Simmons, 1995b:284).

If one should be able to impose equal suffering to the offender, Reiman asks what occurs when for moral reasons, we refrain from exacting the lex talionis and impose a less harsh punishment, are we doing full justice to him. It cannot be the case that we are doing injustice to him or her by imposing a lesser penalty (Reiman in Simmons, 1995b: 287). This implies that there is a range of punishments that includes some a that are less than the exact eye for an eye. This equals what Reiman calls proportional retribbutivism0 society’s worst crimes be punished by society’s worst punishment and so on, is equal to translating the offenders just dessert into its nearest equivalent in the society’s morally accepted punishment (287). Due to this fact, Reiman argues that it is just as just to sentence offenders to life in prison with no chance of parole. We would not be acting unjust, but would be giving the offenders a punishment that some call as the equivalent of being civilly dead (Reiman in Simmons, 1995b: 289).

Reiman also believes that "society has no right to exact the full cost of murders from our murderers until we have done everything possible to rectify the conditions that produce their crimes" (Reiman in Simmons 1995b). Remain claims that reducing the evil things we do to humans is an advance to society as long as lives are not made more dangerous. He hen assumes that we suffer no increased danger, he asks himself the following question: By refraining to do horrible things to our fellows when they justly deserve them, does such refraining to do what is justly deserved amount to a loss? He believes this is only a loss if it amounts to an injustice, which he feels it only does if it falls below the bottom end of the range of just punishments. Other wise he believes it would be unjust to refrain form torturing torturers and raping rapists. (Reiman in Simmons 1995b: 297-298). To complete this argument execution must be shown to be horrible enough to warrant its inclusion alongside torture. Torture says Reiman is especially horrible for two reasons which also characterize execution "intense pain and the spectacle of one human being completely subject to the power of another" (Reiman in Simmons 1995b: 2298-299). Therefore by comparing it to torture, he has argued that execution should be avoided because of how horrible it is to the one executed.

Reiman also speaks of deterrence. Research does not clearly indicate that the death penalty reduces the incidence of homicide more than life imprisonment does. He claims that the refusal to execute teaches a lesson about the wrongfulness of murder (Pojman and Reiman, 1998: 105-106). Taken together Reiman believes that these arguments support his plea to abolish the death penalty even though it is just penalty for murder. In Addition to this Reiman sees discrimination in the application of the death penalty among convicted murderers (Pojman and Remain, 1998:121). He also argues that the definition of murder does not cover all those that murder, citing as other examples Death due to work, and lethal hazards on the job as well as discrimination in the recruitment of murderers (Pojman and Reiman, 1998:123-126). Not only does he find the death penalty unnecessary, but he believes it is used unfairly.

Reiman has been critiqued by several for his views. Van Den Haag claims that Reiman fails to look at the social harm caused by murder and focuses on the responsibility of the murderer rather than the sources that brought him to murder as doe Reiman (Van Den Haag, 1995: 326-327.) Van Den Haag does not support Reiman’s critique that the death penalty is not civilized and further argues that life in prison is in fact more cruel than execution even if it is less harsh (Van Den Haag, 1995: 329-331). Reiman stands at the forefront of the death penalty debate. He is continuously in the debate with the likes of Van Den Haag and Louis Pojman.

Marxian Critique of Criminal Justice

Other areas of interest to Jeffrey Reiman is the Marxian Critique of criminal Justice. He claims that although Marx has not distinctive position on criminal justice, it has a theory on what criminal justice is and thus can account for its source and the social function of the concepts that make it up(Reiman 1987:30). Marx discusses some of the same points that Reiman does in his Pyrrhic Defeat theory, but there are based on different ideas. Marx’s theory serves the powerful by successfully repressing the poor, whereby in the Pyrrhic Defeat theory the system serves the powerful by the failure to reduce crime, not by its success (Reiman 1995: 7). When studying Marx, it must be remembered that he writes about capitalism in its pure form, societies than go and add local factors, traditions and talent, thus influencing the concept of capitalism. The other important aspect to remember is that Marx’s theory of criminal justice is separate from his advocacy of socialism and communism. In sum he says that Marxist theory states that

ordinary crime is by and large the form that class struggle takes in the industrial reserve army and the lumpenproletariat, the group at the very bottom of the society that is only occasionally employed, if at all. . . .In a crisis, the resources become scarcer, the stakes higher , the number of possible winners fewer, the imperative to compete all the more stringent. . .The question of whether they do it in a lawful or an unlawful manner is really the question of whether they have the power to use the law and its institutions to do their grabbing, or to protect what they have (Reiman and Headlee, 1981:40-41).

They further state that if normally functioning capitalism generates pressures and incentives toward criminal behavior, capitalism in crisis intensifies the pressures and increases the incentive, in addition, not only is crime a rational response to this economic insecurity in a competitive society, it is also only on form that competition takes as economic insecurity grow (Reiman and Headlee, 1981:43). Therefore in Reiman’s interpretation, from a Marxist standpoint, rehabilitation is never a serious possibility. Although every person at the bottom of society will not become criminal, but a sufficiently large number of people are kept in conditions of instability and need and some will give into these temptations, depending on such things as support networks, upbringing etc. Therefore trying to rehabilitate individuals who have been sent to prison is nearly impossible if the conditions that sent them there are not fixed (Reiman and Headlee, 1981: 45). Reiman and Headlee have been criticized for their interpretation linking crime to the economic crisis by Greenberg and Humphries because they do not agree with the dates used in the study. They also do not feel that the economic crisis caused the increase in crime, but a political and cultural crisis (Greenberg and Humphries, 1982: 604). Regardless of the specifics that individuals may not agree with, it has been shown that prison sentencing increases during times of high unemployment (Chiricos and Delone, 1992). In addition to that criticism, the were said not to be very Marxist, as they did not discuss ideology (Greenberg and Humphries 1982:606). This is true in this article, but Reiman has since included ideology in his writings of Marxism and criminal justice. In addition, Reiman has been critiqued by his use of the word exploitation in his analysis (Roemer, 1989: 90-91), Reiman’s response is why worry about how exploitation is defined (Reiman 1990: 101). Reiman believes that it should include force, whereas Roemer doesn’t.

In sum, Reiman believes that Marx would say crime is due to the capitalist society. When there is competition, everybody does not always follow the rules. His interpretations are used often in a Marxian critique. In fact, he includes an article on Marx in the appendix of his book, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. It is a topic of debate that continues, analysis of Marx and criminal justice will always be a topic of criminology.

Conclusion

In all of Reiman’s work he emphasizes what he believes is morally correct. He often writes about the justice system and how it often ignores the crimes of the powerful, and overemphasizes the crimes of the poor. His method to reduce crime would be to create legislation that would decrease poverty, have the haves give some money to the have-nots. He sees no reason why poverty should exist in a society like ours. He also sees many biases that create those that are sentences to the death penalty and those who have ordinary sentences. He claims the justice system must start acting just, and informing people of the true dangers to them. At time he uses a Marxist philosophy to emphasize his point, but in general he argues the critical criminologist point, that those in power make the rules and those that are not benefiting those rules have no power to change them.

Notes

1. For further explanation of his statistics for the occupational disease, please see The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison

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