According to Stephen B. Bright, many men, women and children sent to prison every day in the United States are brought before the courts without legal representation, which is essential to a fair trial, a reliable verdict and a fair sentence. We see many examples of this every day. “A poor person arrested by the police may languish in jail for days, weeks, or months before seeing a lawyer for the first time” (Bright 6). Once found guilty, a poor person can risk years in prison or even execution without ever having a lawyer present. Concepts of crime can be defined differently in different societies and can be classified according to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual class, and religious identifications (Bright 6). Common targets of this “poverty to prison” cycle can be seen in When a Heart Turns Solid Rock by Timothy Black. The book shows how schools, jobs, streets, and prisons shaped the lives and choices of poor Puerto Rican boys at the turn of the 21st century. Rather than using a model of urban poverty that blames the poor for their poverty, Black instead focuses, through ethnography, on the social forces that affect the individual lives of three urban Puerto Rican brothers: Julio, Fausto, and Sammy. As the book shows, many of the prison system's targets are poor African-American and Latino men. People from poor neighborhoods are at higher risk of being incarcerated. Outcomes differ across racial and gender groups in the conviction and sentencing of criminals in the United States criminal justice system. Experts debated the relative importance of different factors that led to many of these inequalities. Minority defendants are accused of ...... middle of paper ...... black men. Latino men are also targets of this perception as criminals. Most societies are built to see minorities fail. For example, "to make laws like 'three strikes and you're out' laws, it's true, they're made for habitual criminals, but what is a habitual criminal? ? ...a guy who keeps doing the same crime over and over again, why does he keep doing the same crime?...You never bothered to teach him the first time he entered the prison system” (Black 905). Most minority lives were reflected in this type of scenario when it came to the prison system. Instead of having a system to help them, they had a system that failed them and were considered “criminals”. In some cases, most of the men arrested were for drug possession or minor crimes, but they were treated as second-degree murderers..