In this audio clip, NPR's Kelly McEvers asks Matt Taibbi about the most salacious case in his book, The Divide. Over time I think a kind of Stockholm Syndrome develops, it's kind of the same thing that happens with campaign reporters and candidates: You start to sort of sympathize with the people you cover in this weird subterranean, psychological way. There's almost an inverse relationship between the ease with which you can put a poor person in jail for, say, welfare fraud, and the difficulty that prosecutors face when they try to put someone from a too-big-to-fail bank in jail for a more serious kind of fraud.

What I ended up finding is that it's incredibly easy for people who don't have money to go to jail for just about anything. And then it occurred to me that it's impossible to really talk about the gravity of that problem unless you know who is going to jail in the United States, and how those people go to jail and how that works.

I was covering these gigantic Wall Street white-collar-criminal scandals, and I became interested in the concept of why nobody was going to jail, why we didn't have criminal prosecutions. The book explores the connections between growing income inequality and a justice system that Taibbi says disproportionately punishes the poor.Īlthough he found the subject matter disturbing, Taibbi tells NPR's Kelly McEvers that he took an odd sort of pleasure in writing the book. The result of his investigation is The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. The prison population doubles.įraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world's wealth. With Gonzo zeal, he described a two-party political system splintered into extreme factions in The Great Derangement.Īnd in his newest book, Taibbi sets out to explain what he thinks is a strange state of affairs: With an old-school muckraker's nose for corruption, he examined the events leading up to the 2008 financial crisis in Griftopia. Investigative journalist and author Matt Taibbi has long reported on American politics and business. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Divide Subtitle American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Author Matt Taibbi and Molly Crabapple

The divide matt taibbi sparknotes