Justice for some: a criminal inequality

NONFICTION: SOCIAL SCIENCE letting the managers of massive fraud off the hook.

Taibbi sees the origins of this approach inHolder’s doctrine of “collateral consequences,” which he first propounded as aWhite House aide to President Bill Clinton in 1999. In decidingwhether to charge a bank or a corporation with a criminal offense, Holder wrote, the prosecutor should consider “the possibly substantial consequences to a corporation’s officers, directors, employees, and shareholders.”

“The Divide” is an important book. Its documentation is powerful and shocking. But it can ramble off track, as Taibbi falls in love with a story or a character. Its logic is sometimes diminished by his understandable rage at unethical, though probably not illegal, behavior.

But he drives home the telling point that the wealth-driven dichotomy in our legal system stems from our bending the lawto match our social attitudes.

“The rich have always gotten breaks and the poor have always had to swim upstream,” he concedes. “The new truth is infinitely darker and more twisted.” Today, he concludes, “the rule of law has slowly been replaced by giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth and success on the other.” Hedrick Smith is a former Washington bureau chief of the New York Times.

The failure to jail top bankers in the ’08 financial crash, Matt Taibbi says, reflects a double standard for crime in the U.S. Nicholas Roberts, AFP, Getty Images