Download or read book Too Big to Jail written by Brandon L. Garrett and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-03 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American courts routinely hand down harsh sentences to individual convicts, but a very different standard of justice applies to corporations. Too Big to Jail takes readers into a complex, compromised world of backroom deals, for an unprecedented look at what happens when criminal charges are brought against a major company in the United States. Federal prosecutors benefit from expansive statutes that allow an entire firm to be held liable for a crime by a single employee. But when prosecutors target the Goliaths of the corporate world, they find themselves at a huge disadvantage. The government that bailed out corporations considered too economically important to fail also negotiates settlements permitting giant firms to avoid the consequences of criminal convictions. Presenting detailed data from more than a decade of federal cases, Brandon Garrett reveals a pattern of negotiation and settlement in which prosecutors demand admissions of wrongdoing, impose penalties, and require structural reforms. However, those reforms are usually vaguely defined. Many companies pay no criminal fine, and even the biggest blockbuster payments are often greatly reduced. While companies must cooperate in the investigations, high-level employees tend to get off scot-free. The practical reality is that when prosecutors face Hydra-headed corporate defendants prepared to spend hundreds of millions on lawyers, such agreements may be the only way to get any result at all. Too Big to Jail describes concrete ways to improve corporate law enforcement by insisting on more stringent prosecution agreements, ongoing judicial review, and greater transparency.
Download or read book Too Big to Jail written by Chris Blackhurst and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2022-06-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Packed with insights and details that will both amaze and appal you’ – Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland and Butler to the World From journalist Chris Blackhurst, Too Big to Jail unveils how HSBC facilitated mass money laundering schemes for brutal drug kingpins and rogue nations – and thereby helped to grow one of the deadliest drugs empires the world has ever seen. While HSBC likes to sell itself as ‘the world’s local bank’ – the friendly face of corporate and personal finance – it was one decade ago hit with a record US fine of $1.9 billion. In pursuit of their goal of becoming the biggest bank in the world, between 2003 and 2010, HSBC allowed El Chapo and the Sinaloa cartel, one of the most notorious and murderous criminal organizations in the world, to turn its ill-gotten money into clean dollars. How did a bank, which boasts ‘we’re committed to helping protect the world’s financial system on which millions of people depend, by only doing business with customers who meet our high standards of transparency’ come to facilitate Mexico’s richest drug baron? And how did a bank that as recently as 2002 had been named ‘one of the best-run organizations in the world’ become so entwined with one of the most barbaric groups of gangsters on the planet? Too Big to Jail is an extraordinary story, brilliantly told by writer, commentator and former editor of The Independent, Chris Blackhurst, that starts in Hong Kong and ranges across London, Washington, the Cayman Islands and Mexico, where HSBC saw the opportunity to become the largest bank in the world, and El Chapo seized the chance to fuel his murderous empire by laundering his drug proceeds through the bank. It brings together an extraordinary cast of politicians, bankers, drug dealers, FBI officers and whistle-blowers, and asks what price does greed have? Whose job is it to police global finance? And why did not a single person go to prison for facilitating the murderous expansion of a global drug empire?
Download or read book The Crime Of Our Time written by Danny Schechter and published by Red Wheel Weiser. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Veteran journalist Danny Schechter investigates a complex web of fraud and crime that he shows played a major—if largely unreported—role in bringing the economy down. His four-year investigation focuses on three interconnected cesspools of corruption: what the FBI calls an "epidemic of mortgage fraud," predatory and deceptive securitization by Wall Street, and insurance scams.
Download or read book Big Dirty Money written by Jennifer Taub and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Blood-boiling…with quippy analysis…Taub proposes straightforward fixes and ways everyday people can get involved in taking white-collar criminals to task.”—San Francisco Chronicle How ordinary Americans suffer when the rich and powerful use tax dodges or break the law to get richer and more powerful—and how we can stop it. There is an elite crime spree happening in America, and the privileged perps are getting away with it. Selling loose cigarettes on a city sidewalk can lead to a choke-hold arrest, and death, if you are not among the top 1%. But if you're rich and commit mail, wire, or bank fraud, embezzle pension funds, lie in court, obstruct justice, bribe a public official, launder money, or cheat on your taxes, you're likely to get off scot-free (or even win an election). When caught and convicted, such as for bribing their kids' way into college, high-class criminals make brief stops in minimum security "Club Fed" camps. Operate the scam from the executive suite of a giant corporation, and you can prosper with impunity. Consider Wells Fargo & Co. Pressured by management, employees at the bank opened more than three million bank and credit card accounts without customer consent, and charged late fees and penalties to account holders. When CEO John Stumpf resigned in "shame," the board of directors granted him a $134 million golden parachute. This is not victimless crime. Big Dirty Money details the scandalously common and concrete ways that ordinary Americans suffer when the well-heeled use white collar crime to gain and sustain wealth, social status, and political influence. Profiteers caused the mortgage meltdown and the prescription opioid crisis, they've evaded taxes and deprived communities of public funds for education, public health, and infrastructure. Taub goes beyond the headlines (of which there is no shortage) to track how we got here (essentially a post-Enron failure of prosecutorial muscle, the growth of "too big to jail" syndrome, and a developing implicit immunity of the upper class) and pose solutions that can help catch and convict offenders.
Download or read book Go Directly to Jail written by Gene Healy and published by Cato Institute. This book was released on 2004 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American criminal justice system is becoming ever more centralized and punitive, owing to rampant federalization and mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. Go Directly to Jail examines these alarming trends and proposes reforms that could rein in a criminal justice apparatus at war with fairness and common sense.
Download or read book The Chickenshit Club written by Jesse Eisinger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 Excellence in Financial Journalism Award From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jesse Eisinger, “a fast moving, fly-on-the-wall, disheartening look at the deterioration of the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission…It is a book of superheroes” (San Francisco Review of Books). Why were no bankers put in prison after the financial crisis of 2008? Why do CEOs seem to commit wrongdoing with impunity? The problem goes beyond banks deemed “Too Big to Fail” to almost every large corporation in America—to pharmaceutical companies and auto manufacturers and beyond. The Chickenshit Club—an inside reference to prosecutors too scared of failure and too daunted by legal impediments to do their jobs—explains why in “an absorbing financial history, a monumental work of journalism…a first-rate study of the federal bureaucracy” (Bloomberg Businessweek). Jesse Eisinger begins the story in the 1970s, when the government pioneered the notion that top corporate executives, not just seedy crooks, could commit heinous crimes and go to prison. He brings us to trading desks on Wall Street, to corporate boardrooms and the offices of prosecutors and FBI agents. These revealing looks provide context for the evolution of the Justice Department’s approach to pursuing corporate criminals through the early 2000s and into the Justice Department of today, including the prosecutorial fiascos, corporate lobbying, trial losses, and culture shifts that have stripped the government of the will and ability to prosecute top corporate executives. “Brave and elegant…a fearless reporter…Eisinger’s important and profound book takes no prisoners” (The Washington Post). Exposing one of the most important scandals of our time, The Chickenshit Club provides a clear, detailed explanation as to how our Justice Department has come to avoid, bungle, and mismanage the fight to bring these alleged criminals to justice. “This book is a wakeup call…a chilling read, and a needed one” (NPR.org).
Download or read book Why Not Jail written by Rena Steinzor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The US Department of Justice is under fire for failing to prosecute banks that caused the 2008 economic meltdown because they are too big to jail. Prosecutors have long neglected to hold corporate executives accountable for chronic mistakes that kill and injure workers and customers. This book, the first of its kind, analyzes five industrial catastrophes that have killed or sickened consumers and workers or caused irrevocable harm to the environment. From the Texas City refinery explosion to the Upper Big Branch mine collapse, the root causes of these preventable disasters include crimes of commission and omission. Although federal prosecutors have made a start on holding low-level managers liable, far more aggressive prosecution is appropriate as a matter of law, policy, and justice. Written in accessible and jargon-free language, this book recommends innovative interpretations of existing laws to elevate the prosecution of white-collar crime at the federal and state levels.
Download or read book Convicting the Innocent written by Brandon L. Garrett and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-04 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.
Download or read book The Divide written by Matt Taibbi and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS A scathing portrait of an urgent new American crisis Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail. In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends—growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration—come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime—but it’s impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side. In The Divide, Matt Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice—the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. He uncovers the startling looting that preceded the financial collapse; a wild conspiracy of billionaire hedge fund managers to destroy a company through dirty tricks; and the story of a whistleblower who gets in the way of the largest banks in America, only to find herself in the crosshairs. On the other side of the Divide, Taibbi takes us to the front lines of the immigrant dragnet; into the newly punitive welfare system which treats its beneficiaries as thieves; and deep inside the stop-and-frisk world, where standing in front of your own home has become an arrestable offense. As he narrates these incredible stories, he draws out and analyzes their common source: a perverse new standard of justice, based on a radical, disturbing new vision of civil rights. Through astonishing—and enraging—accounts of the high-stakes capers of the wealthy and nightmare stories of regular people caught in the Divide’s punishing logic, Taibbi lays bare one of the greatest challenges we face in contemporary American life: surviving a system that devours the lives of the poor, turns a blind eye to the destructive crimes of the wealthy, and implicates us all. Praise for The Divide “Ambitious . . . deeply reported, highly compelling . . . impossible to put down.”—The New York Times Book Review “These are the stories that will keep you up at night. . . . The Divide is not just a report from the new America; it is advocacy journalism at its finest.”—Los Angeles Times “Taibbi is a relentless investigative reporter. He takes readers inside not only investment banks, hedge funds and the blood sport of short-sellers, but into the lives of the needy, minorities, street drifters and illegal immigrants. . . . The Divide is an important book. Its documentation is powerful and shocking.”—The Washington Post “Captivating . . . The Divide enshrines its author’s position as one of the most important voices in contemporary American journalism.”—The Independent (UK) “Taibbi [is] perhaps the greatest reporter on Wall Street’s crimes in the modern era.”—Salon
Download or read book The Night Dad Went to Jail written by Melissa Higgins and published by Capstone. This book was released on 2023 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When someone you love goes to jail, you might feel lost, scared, and even mad. What do you do? No matter who your loved one is, this story can help you through the tough times.
Download or read book Letter from a Birmingham Jail written by Dr Martin Luther King and published by HarperOne. This book was released on 2025-01-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Corporate Crime and Punishment written by John C. Coffee and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study and analysis of lack of enforcement against criminal actions in corporate America and what can be done to fix it. In the early 2000s, federal enforcement efforts sent white collar criminals at Enron and WorldCom to prison. But since the 2008 financial collapse, this famously hasn’t happened. Corporations have been permitted to enter into deferred prosecution agreements and avoid criminal convictions, in part due to a mistaken assumption that leniency would encourage cooperation and because enforcement agencies don’t have the funding or staff to pursue lengthy prosecutions, says distinguished Columbia Law Professor John C. Coffee. “We are moving from a system of justice for organizational crime that mixed carrots and sticks to one that is all carrots and no sticks,” he says. He offers a series of bold proposals for ensuring that corporate malfeasance can once again be punished. For example, he describes incentives that could be offered to both corporate executives to turn in their corporations and to corporations to turn in their executives, allowing prosecutors to play them off against each other. Whistleblowers should be offered cash bounties to come forward because, Coffee writes, “it is easier and cheaper to buy information than seek to discover it in adversarial proceedings.” All federal enforcement agencies should be able to hire outside counsel on a contingency fee basis, which would cost the public nothing and provide access to discovery and litigation expertise the agencies don't have. Through these and other equally controversial ideas, Coffee intends to rebalance the scales of justice. “Professor Coffee’s compelling new approach to holding fraudsters to account is indispensable reading for any lawmaker serious about deterring corporate crime.” —Robert Jackson, professor of Law, New York University, and former commissioner, Securities and Exchange Commission “A great book that more than any other recent volume deftly explains why effective prosecution of corporate senior executives largely collapsed in the post-2007–2009 stock market crash period and why this creates a crisis of underenforcement. No one is Professor Coffee’s equal in tying together causes for the crisis.” —Joel Seligman, author, historian, former law school dean, and president emeritus, University of Rochester
Download or read book Don t Go to Jail written by Saul Goodman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawyer Saul Goodman of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad offers his own particular brand of funny, down-to-earth legal advice. Got the long arm of the law around your neck? Does Lady Justice have her eye on you? Were you set up at a lineup? Saul Goodman can help! There are some crazy laws out there. Did you know that in New Mexico there’s a law that says “idiots” can’t vote? Or that Massachusetts still has a ban on Quakers and witches? Or that in Georgia it’s illegal to put a donkey in a bathtub? Even if you’re not bathing a donkey (and hey, if you are, no judgment from me!), you could be breaking the law right now and not even know it. That’s why you need Don't Go to Jail! You can carry the advice of a seasoned legal practitioner with you anywhere you go, helping you to stay out of the courts and in the good graces of the criminal justice system. Want to be your own attorney? Want to avoid getting hauled in on a warrant? Want to keep the cops from discovering the baggie of “your friend’s” marijuana stashed under the passenger seat of your car? This is your chance to get those tips and many more savory bits of indispensable legal advice--all for much less than my usual hourly fee.
Download or read book Juilliard to Jail written by Leah Joki and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2013-03-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leah Joki was a Juilliard-trained actress looking for fame and fortune in Hollywood, but her path took a one hundred and eighty degree turn when she fell in love with teaching theater in prisons. She specialized in working with “twenty-five to lifers” - adult male maximum-security prisoners. Juilliard to Jail is a non-fiction account of her eighteen-year career as a teacher, performer and administrator inside the California state prison system. Her memoir combines laugh-out-loud stories about the eccentricities of modern-day prison life with harrowing details of inmate threats, crimes and departmental corruption. She chronicles California's innovative Arts in Corrections program through its glory years and its political demise. The impact of Leah's high-stress career on her personal life provides a poignant backdrop to a story both funny and flippant, but not for the faint of heart.
Download or read book End of Its Rope written by Brandon Garrett and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, death sentences in the U.S. are as rare as lightning strikes. Brandon Garrett shows us the reasons why, and explains what the failed death penalty experiment teaches about the effect of inept lawyering, overzealous prosecution, race discrimination, wrongful convictions, and excessive punishments throughout the criminal justice system.
Download or read book Running the Books written by Avi Steinberg and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Avi Steinberg is stumped. After defecting from yeshiva to attend Harvard, he has nothing but a senior thesis on Bugs Bunny to show for himself. While his friends and classmates advance in the world, Steinberg remains stuck at a crossroads, his “romantic” existence as a freelance obituary writer no longer cutting it. Seeking direction (and dental insurance) Steinberg takes a job running the library counter at a Boston prison. He is quickly drawn into the community of outcasts that forms among his bookshelves—an assortment of quirky regulars, including con men, pimps, minor prophets, even ghosts—all searching for the perfect book and a connection to the outside world. Steinberg recounts their daily dramas with heartbreak and humor in this one-of-a-kind memoir—a piercing exploration of prison culture and an entertaining tale of one young man’s earnest attempt to find his place in the world.
Download or read book Prisoners of Politics written by Rachel Elise Barkow and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America’s criminal justice system reflects irrational fears stoked by politicians seeking to win election. Pointing to specific policies that are morally problematic and have failed to end the cycle of recidivism, Rachel Barkow argues that reform guided by evidence, not politics and emotions, will reduce crime and reverse mass incarceration.
