In his praiseworthy new book, “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,” Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi expertly examines how, ever since the 2008 financial crisis, the disparity in treatment between rich and poor in our justice system has increased so that now we have reached the proverbial tipping point.
Taibbi claims that the causative factors are the enormous resources recently devoted to get-tough-on-crime tactics—think stop-and-frisk, pursuing undocumented immigrants for petty crimes, and cracking down on food stamp and welfare fraud—and on the other hand, how no executive from a major financial institution saw the inside of a prison after the 2008 crisis.
