Why Don’t Bankers Go to Jail?

Jesse Eisinger’s book “The Chickenshit Club” asks why the Justice Department fails to prosecute financial executives for criminal business dealings. The staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, who has covered crime of many kinds, reviewed the book for The New Yorker. He compared notes with his fellow staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar, who writes the magazine’s Financial Page. How, they wonder, can the government charge a bank a sixteen-billion-dollar fine for wrongdoing yet fail to prosecute any individual at that bank for a crime?