This best-selling text examines the premise that the criminal justice system is biased against the poor from
start to finish, from the definition of what constitutes a crime through the process of arrest, trial, and sentencing.
Also, this text discusses how this bias is accompanied with a general refusal to remedy the causes of crime--poverty,
lack of education, and discrimination.
One reviewer describes this text as "one of the most outstanding critiques of the criminal justice process�a book
that needed to be written and needs to be publishing again and again�a text as relevant today as when first published
in 1979."
The author argues that actions of well-off people, such as their refusal to make workplaces safe, refusal to curtail
deadly pollution, promotion of unnecessary surgery, and prescriptions for unnecessary drugs, cause occupational
and environmental hazards to innocent members of the public and produce just as much death, destruction, and financial
loss as so-called crimes of the poor. However, these acts of the well-off are rarely treated as crimes, and when
they are, they are never treated as severely as crimes of the poor.