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

Antonio got two years of probation and 180 hours of community service. Nobody is saying people like this aren’t guilty, or that there shouldn’t be a punishment for deceiving the government and for making taxpayers pay the medical bills for her and her husband’s three kids. But if her crime gets punished, someone else committing the same crime has to receive the same punishment. This stuff isn’t brain surgery. But there just aren’t cases of bankers or mortgage lenders doing jail time or lengthy community service stints for dumping bad loans into mortgage pools. Nobody from a bank or a ratings agency is losing his or her kids or housing because he or she sold or helped sell bad loans to, say, King County, Washington, or the Iowa Student Loan Liquidity Corporation. It just doesn’t happen. The method for dealing with that kind of offender increasingly involves fines and noncriminal sanctions. Responsibility for the fraud redounds to the institution, which takes the punishment. The only thing that changes is that as the economy stagnates more and more, and the wealth divide gets bigger, it becomes less and less possible for law enforcement to imagine the jail-or-garbage option for the Collateral Consequences crowd, and more and more possible to imagine it for an ever-expanding population of Everyone Else.