The author argues that the current "lock 'em up" policy in the United States has diverted attention from a close examination of a social structure and culture that produce criminal activity. To lay the theoretical foundation for this argument, the author applies Messner and Rosenfeld's (1994) "sociological paradigm" from "Crime and the American Dream" to Irwin and Austin's (1994) "imprisonment binge" in "It's About Time: America's Imprisonment Binge." The paper first suggests, however, that Messner and Rosenfeld did not go far enough in framing their paradigm and proposes an addition to their work by Marxist criminology. The author includes Marxist theory with the theories used by Messner and Rosenfeld to develop a more comprehensive theoretical foundation on which to examine crime in American society. The new paradigm is then applied to a new approach to crime. A list of policy alternative offered by Marxist criminologists are outlined. These include defining crime according to the amount of harm inflicted on society, reducing the capacity of capital to displace labor, reducing inequality in the social structure, abolishing mandatory sentences that discriminate against lower- class America, and taking a closer look at the enactment of laws that involve punitive government intervention to create new classes of criminals (e.g., laws that criminalize the homeless). 37 references