America's Two-Tiered Justice System: There's a Big Difference Between Crime and Punishment in Wall Street vs in Ferguson

A reporter investigated how so many Americans do end up in jail – and what he learned blew him away

By Matt Taibbi
Like nearly all white, American journalists, I’ve spent most of my career a million miles from places like Ferguson, Missouri. The mainstream media in the US hates the urban racism story and always has: too depressing; no patriotic angle; too hard to sell to advertisers.

So, reporters like me often find themselves tugged in the direction of less commercially upsetting beats. It might be presidential politics, gay marriage, global warming. In my case, it was high finance. As a correspondent for Rolling Stone, I spent years covering Wall Street corruption, briefly earning disrepute in lower Manhattan for calling Goldman Sachs a “vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”.

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Even in the most abject and horrific cases – such as the scandal surrounding HSBC, which admitted to laundering more than $800m for central and South American drug cartels – no individual ever has to do a day in jail or pay so much as a cent in fines.

What punishments there are in the US for these firms – usually some version of a “We really, really promise never to do it again” deferred prosecution agreement, accompanied by superficially large fines – are always paid by the shareholder, not the actual wrongdoer.

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When I asked another why no one went to jail in the HSBC narco-laundering case, given that our prisons were teeming with people who’d sold small quantities of drugs, he answered, again totally deadpan: “Have you been to a jail? Those places are dangerous!”

There is no way to talk about how preposterous all of this is without first answering one basic question: who does go to jail in the US?

The simplified answer is that the poorer and less white you are, the easier it is to end up in jail. If you live in the wrong neighbourhood and you’re broke, on the dole, or, worse, undocumented, your chances of seeing the back of a squad car are better than fair every time you walk outside.

I know this is not exactly breaking news. In this country – and everywhere else – the rich have always had an easier time in the courts than the poor. But the sheer breadth of the current justice gap in the US blows the mind when viewed up close.

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