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Recall that more than 800 bankers went to jail after the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. And that mess wreaked nowhere near the devastation that the housing debacle did on the overall United States economy. Embarrassed, perhaps, by their passivity, Justice Department officials recently pledged to take a more aggressive approach to white-collar crime. But the memo issued last September by Sally Quillian Yates, deputy attorney general, outlining new ways the department would hold individuals to account, has not translated into results. These kinds of cases, of course, take time to mount. Still, data supplied by the Justice Department and compiled by Syracuse University shows that white-collar crime prosecutions are actually down significantly in 2016 from previous years. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse indicates that through August — the first 11 months of the government's most recent fiscal year — prosecutions of all types were down almost 18 percent from five years ago.
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