I am extremely honored to be here. I am, in
addition to being honored to be here, surprised. Surprised that twenty years
have passed since the original publication of The Rich Get Richer,
surprised that the book seems still to be a popular text, and surprised at how
little has changed with respect to the economic bias in criminal justice that
the book tries to document. (Of course, I thank all of you for forcing your
students to buy The Rich Get Richer year after year, thereby making me
richer and — per my hypothesis — helping me stay out of prison.)
Not that I thought the publication of The Rich Get Richer
would bring about massive social change (though my mother still wonders why the
President hasn’t offered me a cabinet-level job to fix the criminal justice
system). Rather it occurs to me that my book was originally published at a time
when many writers were bringing social science research to bear on the economic
bias in the criminal justice system. Indeed, not many years before, the Johnson
crime commission report, "The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society,"
had emphasized the way in which the criminal justice system systematically
focused on the poor and powerless in our society, writing, in language that now
seems almost quaint: "The offender at the end of the road in prison is
likely to be a member of the lowest social and economic groups in the
country." But for all this attention and documentation, little has
changed--on some accounts things have gotten worse.
Of course, the mechanisms of economic bias have changed. Now
we have sentencing guidelines the effect of which is that judges no longer have
the discretion with which to favor well-off folks — instead that is now left
to prosecutors whose discretionary decisions about charging are far harder to
monitor, happening as they do, not in open court, but behind closed doors. And
this is not to mention the bias that is built into the sentencing guidelines
themselves (and the extremely harsh minimum sentences that often accompany
them), such as the famous gap between the penalty for crack cocaine and that for
powder. Likewise, as police have hopefully become less and less racist in their
personal outlooks, the war on drugs has led to massive police presence in the
poorest sections of our cities, with the inevitable effect that poor drug
sellers continue to be arrested and imprisoned in great numbers, while it is
obvious that the drug trade reaches far beyond the inner city.
Economic bias is still with us. What has changed is that the
attention and concern that was once focused on economic bias as a serious
problem that threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the criminal justice
system has steadily diminished. It was easy to find material for the first
edition of The Rich Get Richer because the social science journals were
chock full of studies showing economic bias in criminal justice; but as the
years have passed, with each succeeding revision of the book, I have found the
studies decreasing in number and eventually dwindling to a trickle. At the same
time, I have yet to find a major criminology textbook that even has an index
entry on economic status or class; the FBI Index gives no information of the
economic class of arrestees for various crimes, the Bureau of Prisons reports
give only scant information on the pre-incarceration economic situation of
current inmates, the Victimization Reports give some gross categorization of
victimization by household income but of course nothing about that of the
victimizers, and so on.
So we have on one hand a continuation — some times even an
aggravation — of economic bias, and, on the other hand, a diminution of
studies by social scientists (not to mention an unbroken silence among
politicians and other leaders) about that economic bias. I think that there is a
lesson to be learned here about the power of ideology and the way in which it
works.
It
is commonly thought that ideology is a system of false beliefs. But I think that
this is a mistaken view, for several reasons. First, it is, I think, a plain
fact that people’s judgments are generally rational in light of their
experience and normally correct. Any serious doubt of this flies in the face of
reality, but it also leads to the most depressing implications for progressives
since if you think that people are generally irrational and mistaken in their
judgments you cannot be very optimistic about the possibility of social change.
Moreover, if the people are generally irrational, what of the social scientists?
How can they even identify beliefs as ideological if they too, being people, are
generally irrational?
Second, if ideology were just false beliefs, I think it would
be easier to penetrate ideology than it palpably is. After all, coupled with the
general rationality of the people, showing a belief to be false should open the
way to contrary beliefs. And third, the simple fact is that people know about
economic bias in the criminal justice system. Is there anyone in America who,
after months of the O. J. Simpson murder trial, is unaware that O. J. got the
best justice that money could buy? Whether one thinks he was guilty or innocent,
no one can doubt that a poor defendant with similar evidence against him would
have been lucky to get away with a life sentence!
Rather it seems that people are aware of economic bias, but
they’re just not outraged about it. Economic bias in criminal justice
seems rather like the many other ways in which rich people get better treatment
than poor folks. It’s more or less par for the course. In America some people
are rich and some are poor and that’s life and you get what you pay for, and
so on.
I think that this becomes easier to understand if we think of
ideology, not as false beliefs, but rather as an angle of moral vision--an angle
of vision from which the world is seen, and in light of which facts are
evaluated morally.
To fix this idea (and perhaps entertain you as well), I want
to use as a way of showing the nature of ideology something from the old days of
TV, when the world was black and white. At that time, as some of you might have
heard, there was a very brilliant creative oddball comedian named Ernie Kovacs
who had a daytime TV show. On one of these shows, there was a skit that took
place in what looked like a farmhouse kitchen. In the middle of the kitchen, two
farmers sat at a wooden table. On the table was a pitcher of milk and a glass,
and a bowl of oranges. When one farmer tried to pour the milk from the pitcher
into the glass, the milk, instead of flowing vertically down into the glass,
flowed at a diagonal, missing the glass by inches and causing gales of laughter
in the studio and in my house. When the other farmer put an orange on the table
in preparation for cutting it up and eating it, rather than staying put, it
rolled horizontally across the table and fell on the floor, causing further
laughter in the studio and my house. This went on until the laughter reached
life-threatening proportions. Then, a second TV camera on the side of the set
was turned on to show how this hilarious feat had been accomplished. What now
was visible was that the farmhouse kitchen was titled at an angle of about 15
degrees and the TV camera and camera operator who were shooting it during the
skit were slanted at the same angle.
That’s how ideology works! Imagine that the slant in
the set represents the degree to which relationships in a society are
characterized by morally unjustified domination. I don’t mean merely
hierarchical relations or differences in power, since these might be justified.
By morally unjustified domination, I mean relations that are based on no more
than the power of some to control the lives of others. Imagine that the farmers
at the table and camera operator televising them--and even us, the viewers at
home--are the members of this slanted society. Ideology, then, is represented by
the fact that the members of the society are, so to speak, lined up with the
society so that they see it as not slanted. Instead of relations of
unjustified domination, they and we see the famous "level playing
field."
More precisely, ideology is an angle of vision that makes
unequal relations look like relations between equals, and thus turns their
inequality into a matter of morally irrelevant differences. Then, for example,
if the two farmers were to get into a fight, the one on the higher side of the
slanted floor would have an advantage over the other--but it wouldn’t be seen
as a morally unjustified advantage. It would look as if he just were stronger or
a better fighter. And that’s generally how economic advantage looks in our
society, namely, as if it were a matter of each individuals’ good or bad luck,
special talents or lack of them--but not as a form or effect of unjustified
domination.
In Marxian theory, the mechanism that accomplishes this
varies with the mode of production. In feudalism, it is the belief in the
equality of souls before God, in conjunction with which, differences in power
look like punishments or rewards for sins or like conditions of the test that
all must pass to get into heaven, but in any event as not very important
compared to the divine judgment that all are subject to and the eternal
condition to which that will lead. In capitalism, the corresponding mechanism is
the law, not just the law in the courts, that of course, but also
"legality" as a governing metaphor for human relations, seeing people
as "owners" of themselves and so on. The law bestows to capitalist and
worker alike the same rights to property and control over themselves.
Accordingly, they meet as two people each equally free to come to terms with the
other or to refuse to. Their differences, the fact that one owns a factory and
machines and raw materials and the other owns the muscles in his back, look like
natural differences--matters of good or bad luck, but not like unjustified
domination. And the same effect spreads through the society: so that differences
in wealth are not seen as forms or means of unjustified domination, but only as
morally irrelevant differences.
Notice
in this view of things, people are not thought to be irrational, and their
beliefs (this is a table, that’s an orange) are generally correct. All they
and we fail to see is the real moral angle of the playing field. I think, by the
way, that this accurately characterizes neo-classical economics of the Milton
Friedman variety. Not only is just about everything that neo-classicists say
about the economy true, just about everything they say was believed true by
Marx! However, unlike Marx, the neo-classicists just don’t see the slant, and
thus everything they say is ideological!
Blind to the slant, economic differences in our society look
like individual differences in fortune, like difference in talent or strength,
not like forms or means of unjustified domination. We may envy the rich and feel
sorry for the poor, but we don’t normally see poverty itself as a form of
socially caused victimization. Consequently, we grow accustomed to the fact that
people have different amounts of wealth and get different sorts of treatment as
a result, and we feel it would be better if this were less so, but it is after
all not that terrible, no more terrible than the fact that some people are
smarter than others and get better treatment for that reason.
If this is so, then we might wonder how it was that in the
sixties and seventies there was widespread recognition, by social scientists and
even by some political leaders, of economic bias. And I think that the answer is
that the slant in the society becomes visible at times of social upheaval, like
the Great Depression in the 30s, and like the convergence of the civil rights
and anti-war movements that gave America it’s own cultural revolution in the
60s. Until such upheavals, concern about the economic bias in the system is
likely to be limited to small groups, such as critical criminologists.
The author can be reached
at the Department of Philosophy and Religion, American University,
Washington, D.C., 20016.
