Why federal prosecutors often wimp out in going after financial malfeasance

Jesse Eisinger's book The Chickenshit Club was reviewed in the Washington Post.

One would not realize that the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world by examining prosecutions of white-collar criminals. Senior bankers, Fortune 500 execs, Big Eight accountants and white-shoe lawyers are the thugs who brought us the 2008 financial meltdown, the worst since the Great Depression. For the unspeakable misery these corporate swindlers caused — the decimated retirement funds and the massive unemployment — not one top executive has gone to prison. Rather, U.S. prisons are teeming with the poor and the powerless.

The Chickenshit Club is Jesse Eisinger’s powerful lamentation of a justice system as upside down as 0mortgages left in the wake of corporate greed. The book’s title is drawn from a speech by James Comey, the recently deposed FBI director, when he served in the early 2000s as the head federal prosecutor in Manhattan. The club, Comey explained to new lawyers in his office, is a dishonor society for prosecutors who have never lost a case. Eisinger, in this brave and elegant takedown of the U.S. Department of Justice, makes it clear that he shares Comey’s view that government lawyers who pursue only slam dunks are more concerned with winning cases than doing justice.