It was written, you know, “obstructing pedestrian traffic,” which it turns out it meant that he was standing in front of his own house at 1:00 in the morning, and the police just didn’t like the way he looked and arrested him.Īnd this is part of the disorderly conduct statute here in New York, but this is one of these offenses that people get roped in for. And I asked him to show me his summons, and he pulled out a little-little piece of pink paper, and there it was. And I asked him what he was there for, and he told me that he had been arrested for, quote-unquote, “obstructing pedestrian traffic.” And I thought he was kidding.
I was actually in a-I was in a law office in Brooklyn, and I was actually waiting to speak to a lawyer about another case, when I met this 35-year-old African-American man, a bus driver. There was one case of a man in New York, who lives in Bed-Stuy, standing outside of his home-ĪARON MATÉ: -who was arrested.
Why was there no enforcement of any of this? And around the time of the Occupy protest, I decided to write this book, and then I shifted my focus to try to learn a lot more for myself about who does go to jail in this country, because I thought you really can’t make this comparison accurately until you learn about both sides of the equation, because it’s actually much more grotesque to consider the non-enforcement of white-collar criminals when you do consider how incredibly aggressive law enforcement is with regard to everybody else.ĪARON MATÉ: Now, you spent time with the-with the poor and vulnerable and people of color, who have been targeted by this system. And after a while, I started to become interested specifically in that phenomenon. And the punchline to all of the stories were basically the same: Nobody would get indicted nobody went to jail. And over and over again, I would cover these very complex and often very socially destructive capers committed by white-collar criminals. I’ve obviously been doing it since the crash in 2008. MATT TAIBBI: This book grew out of my experience covering Wall Street. I interviewed Matt Taibbi with Democracy Now!’s Aaron Maté, and I began by asking Matt to talk about this divide. The book asks why the vast majority of white-collar criminals have avoided prison since the financial crisis began, while an unequal justice system imprisons the poor and people of color on a mass scale. In Apriltaibbi, journalist Matt Taibbi joined us on Democracy Now! to talk about his new book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!,, The War and Peace Report_.
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