The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

by Matt Taibbi

Whether they knew about it or cared about it, that’s what the new policy was turning out to be: For the small subset of offenders who are guilty of truly systemic, transformative, organized crime, for offenders to whom losing a big case could be politically embarrassing, let’s carefully consider the collateral consequences of criminal prosecution. But for everybody else, let’s ignore them more than ever before.

The architects of Collateral Consequences seemingly didn’t realize they were starting a revolution. They were accelerating a government-sponsored sorting of the entire population into arrestable and nonarrestable classes.

In 2011, the year before Tory got arrested, another year when exactly nobody on Wall Street was arrested for crimes connected to the financial crisis, New York City police stopped and searched a record 684,724 people. Out of those, 88 percent were black or Hispanic. The ostensible justification for the program is looking for guns, but they find guns in less than 0.02 percent of stops.

Meanwhile, during the mid-2000s, a state arbitrator forced the NYPD to slash starting yearly salaries for new officers to a preposterous $25,100. The reduced pay forced some 4,500 officers to quit in a period of a few years in the middle of the decade. The ones who stayed on the job had to really scramble to make a living wage. They did so by inventing an entirely new way of doing the job. It would be a revolution in what Levine calls “sub-misdemeanor policing.”

Strangest of all, immigration proceedings are run by immigration judges, who are not “Article III” judges—not members of the judicial branch, as described in the U.S. Constitution. Immigration judges are actually employees of the Department of Homeland Security. In other words, they work for the same branch of government that prosecutes the cases.

In the wake of the 2008 crisis, Clinton is most frequently criticized for overseeing two radical changes to our regulatory structure: the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to allow the mergers of investment banks, commercial banks, and insurance companies, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which deregulated the burgeoning derivatives market. Less commonly understood is that Clinton, Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers also oversaw the collapse of what are known as “selective credit controls,” the tools used to rein in irresponsible lending.