The Analysis of The Book "The Divide" by Taibbi

The conclusion “Unequal wealth means unequal criminal justice.” is the perfect description of the illustration on the book’s cover. We can see the scale of justice in which one of the weighing platforms contains some people and the other one is full while some are struggling to hop on it, others can’t even make it and just fall off.

This is because Lady Justice is blinded and cannot handle well the scale. A scale of justice is the symbol of fairness in a legal process that indicates that both sides of the case have to be taken into consideration in court. This illustration perfectly shows how the government reacts during the juridical process. As Lady Justice, the authorities are blinded by the wealth of the defendant. If a party is wealthier than the other, it is assured that they will make it while the other would be punished.

An example in the book that illustrates this fact is the arrest of Tory a halfway homeless man, walking on the streets with a filthy appearance. He was “stopped-and -frisked” by the police, a method that started in 1991 which gave the right to police to stop and search anyone. They found half a joint of marijuana in his pocket and was later sent to the most dangerous prison on Rikers Island. In 2005, HSBC fed drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia billions of dollars, covered up bank transactions for terrorist groups like Al Qaïda and for Russian gangsters totaling $20 billion worth of transactions. But guess who got punished? Tory Marone, for smoking the products they financed.

As Taibbi said “A homeless man with half a joint in his pocket is getting a bigger penalty than a bank laundering millions of dollars. HSBC got a fine, a homeless man goes to jail”. If the police would have caught an affluent person smoking marijuana, they wouldn’t make it a big deal. They would at least not be taken to jail.

“Poverty has been criminalized, while wealth has been given a free pass.” Criminalizing something is to make it illegal by the law or to turn someone into a criminal if referring to a person. Since forever, money has been a synonym of power, an instrument with which people could get away with in any situation including crime.

These cases are perfectly illustrated by Taibbi in The Divide where we can see that wealth uses money as a “free pass” to avoid criminal justice. In the introduction of his book, Taibbi states that poor people spend time in jail for “the most minor offenses imaginable” that “rich people do at some time in their lives” and this is the closest argument to the assertion “Poverty has been criminalized, while wealth has been given a free pass.” In this country, as long as you are rich, white and more specifically American, you do not have to fear the authorities as you fit the “norm”.

Wealthy people in rich neighborhoods are never stopped for smoking a cigarette or for being drunk. If they’re arrested by the police, the latter would talk to them with respect, not by mortifying the suspect such as when the police talked to Maria Espinosa and threatening to take her kid if she didn’t leave her boyfriend (which she couldn’t do because of the lack of financial resources). A perfect example that illustrates this assertion is the story of Andrew Brown, a man who had a quite miserable childhood. He never had a stable family. His mother had to go to rehab and leave him and his sister alone with his aunt.

In 1989, he started getting involved in selling drugs, stealing jewelry and other sorts of crimes. As Taibbi said, he had a “master’s degree from the streets”. One time his mother got questioned for a crime her son committed and it was said that she was pressured by the police to say that he had a gun which goes back to criminalizing the poor. Andrew was arrested for several minor crimes one case that was banal was when he was arrested for being on the sidewalk. At court where the author was present and asked the judge if he ever heard of a white man stopped for the same “offense”, the judge said, “Low-class people do low-class things”. Being of a different race is also not part of the norm “rich, white, American”. The example of the Vietnamese women who applied for welfare and was asked why she carried sexy panties if she didn’t have a boyfriend who might be financing her, is the perfect example of how immigrants are also a victim of this unequal criminal justice system.