not generate any heat and no serious changes have occurred in the criminal justice system since that time (Reiman, 17). This is one example of how our government spends money talking about fighting crime but not making any real changes to prevent it.
Reiman notes that during last 30 years, more than four billion dollars was spent annually for police, courts, and correctional facilities to fight crime. And, author Reiman estimates more than 74 billion dollars has been spent between 1965 and 1990. So, during this period there was a 360 percent increase in criminal justice spending and yet crime rates rose dramatically (from 4,710,000 crimes a year in the U.S. in 1965 to 14,872,883 crimes a year by 1990) (Reiman, 17). Thus is seems like there is no correlation between the amount of money the government pours into programs that are supposed to reduce crime but are not really effective. Overall, Reiman believes that there are policies which the government could use to reduce crime and that our government has simply failed to enact them.
To support his argument, Reiman quotes authors Durkheim and Erikson. He claims that Durkheim believes that society benefits from social deviants (Reiman, 39). With respect to Erikson's theories, Reiman admittedly modifies Erikson's ideas to fit his purpose, specifically, to support the hypothesis that our justice system does not really reduce crime because it was not designed to reduce it, but rather to support a healthy criminal population that our society seems to need to function. In other words, Erikson's viewpoint supports the concept that a visible crime population is necessary to support the "boundaries" that have been an important part of America's cultural identity (Reim
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