The Christian Right gets a lot of political milage out of portraying itself as standing up for moral values and standing firm against immoral behavior. They benefit from an image of being tough on crime, but not all crimes are created equal: for some strange reason, crimes committed by poor minorities are the ones that receive "toughness" while white-collar crimes are given a much lighter touch.

In The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, David Callahan writes:

The zeal in the '80s and '90s to impose mandatory minimums and "three-strikes policies" never extended to white-collar crimes. For example, the executives at the agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland who orchestrated a global price-fixing conspiracy that cost consumers $500 million faced maximum prison terms of only three years when they were sentenced in 1999. Even then the judge went easy on them... giving them only two years in prison. In another case, Bruce J. Kingdon, who confessed to committing serious fraud at Bankers Trust, was sentenced in 2000 to 450 hours of community service, mandatory weekly therapy, and was fined $180,500.

Compare those sentences to the case of Chrissy Taylor, a thirty-year-old California woman who has already served ten years of a two-decade prison sentence imposed for purchasing legal chemicals that her boyfriend used to make drugs, or to the plight of Clarence Aaron, a nonviolent first-time offender who is now serving life without parole in an Atlanta prison for introducing two drug dealers to one another. Taylor was an impressionable nineteen-year-old whose main mistake in life was hooking up with the wrong guy; Aaron was a troubled senior at college in New Orleans when he committed his crime.

If all this isn't bad enough, consider the fact that there is — or at least was, since I don't know if it has been closed — a loophole that allows white collar criminals to deduct their at least some of their fines as business expenses. Ivan Boesky was fined USD $100 million for insider trading and he deducted $50 million as a business expense from his federal income taxes. People like Boesky and corporations like ADM do at least as much harm as people like Chrissy Taylor, but they obviously don't get punished anywhere near as much. We also don't see those campaigning on platforms of "traditional morality" saying anything about the need to punish such people and corporations.

Why does this difference exist? Well, one thing that should be clear is that the actual harm done is irrelevant. The degree to which something is punished and the degree to which something is held up as an example of declining moral standards has no connection to how much harm is done and how many people are hurt. The second thing that is clear is how the people getting the lightest punishment are the closest to the self-righteous moralizers in terms of race, class, and culture.

When politicians claim to be promoting "traditional" moral values, they should be asked directly about things like white collar crime and whether they favor serious punishments for massive frauds or if they only favor punishing poor, non-violent criminals form racial minorities. They should be asked about whether they believe the Justice System should deliver the same quality of justice to poor minorities as it does to rich white people. Their answers will tell you a lot about what this politician really stands for and whether they can be trusted with real power.

 

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