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Matt Taibbi, The divide: American injustice in the age of the wealth gap

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.1177/0004865816653619
Published date01 March 2017
Date01 March 2017
Subject MatterBook Reviews
SG-ANJ-50-01-TOC 1..2 148
Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 50(1)
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Matt Taibbi, The divide: American injustice in the age of the wealth gap. Spiegel & Grau: New York,
2014; xxiii + 416 pp. ISBN 978-0-812-98363-0, $40 (NZD)
Reviewed by: Grace Gordon, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Many academics have written about America’s criminal justice system, but none have
raised these questions in quite the way that Matt Taibbi does in The Divide. In an age
when violent crimes are reportedly decreasing, the American prison population is
increasing. It is not corporate criminals who are causing this prison boom; rather,
America’s prisons are f‌illed with poor, and generally non-white, citizens. In this extensive
book, Taibbi demonstrates that in America a divide separates the way in which law is
enforced for the wealthy and the poor. Although Taibbi, who has written about white-
collar crime for Rolling Stone, provides the reader with an in-depth look into the large-
scale crimes of corporations, it is his connection to the people on the other side of the
divide that is truly captivating.
This 416-page popular book is divided into an introduction followed by nine chapters
that...

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