Breaking the Carnival Mirror

Abstract

We present a reflexive paper assignment calling for students to report on their own family and/or personal experiences in order to answer the question, “From where does the greatest harm arise?” We find that, through the process of answering this question and sharing findings in class, students’ conception of criminality is broadened. Institutional forms of deviance and white-collar crime come to be understood as the real commonplace sources of harm while street crime is seen to be less common than typically imagined. The book The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class and Criminal Justice by Reiman and Leighton informs this assignment. The authors make the case that the criminal justice system presents to us a carnival mirror-like image of what causes the greatest harm to the society. The criminal justice system, through its policies and procedures, leads the public to conceive of only a narrow and distorted depiction of criminality. The typical crime is thought to be person to person, violent, and carried out by the typical criminal, who is assumed to be black, young, and urban. In opposition to this carnival mirror view, Reiman and Leighton explain that certain institutions cause immensely more harm than that caused by street criminality.