Over the past few decades law enforcement in the United States has taken a troubling turn for the worse.

While the rich have always enjoyed better treatment in court, presumably ever since the invention of courts of law, the playing field has been tipped to the point that it may soon tip over. 

We all know that overworked public defenders can't possibly provide the same time and attention to each case that can readily be purchased from private lawyers. And it is arguably true that someone with no financial stake in a community might present more of a flight risk than someone deeply invested, making pre-trial release and bond amounts a matter of cautious evaluation. But the shift that has overtaken our systems of policing and adjudication is breathtaking and appalling.

A poor person caught selling a bag of marijuana is almost certain to spend time in jail, if not prison. An equally poor person receiving food stamps may be charged with felony fraud for misreporting tips from a part-time job in food service. A somewhat better off home "owner" may get behind in house payments and land in foreclosure. This is happening not just here and there, or occasionally—its happening to tens of thousands of our fellow citizens.

Meanwhile, solid evidence revealed that HSBC (the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation) was engaged in money laundering for Mexican and Columbian drug cartels, for terrorist organizations in the mid-east, helping international companies duck trade sanctions, and servicing Russian mobsters, altogether helping to hide billions of dollars of illegal cash, in multiple countries around the world and not one of the responsible executives served a minute in jail. So the white-collar criminals who put the bag of pot in the poor man's hand walked.

UBS, Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland rigged interest rates, paid bribes, traded insider information and impacted the price of hundreds of trillions, that's trillions with a "T," worth of financial instruments, defrauding every person on the planet who is in any way connected to currency, in what was then the biggest case of fraud in world history. Nobody went to prison, while the poor schmuck accused of misreporting tips often lands in prison.

Jamie Dimon and others involved in JPMorganChase and its subsidiaries marketed billions of dollars in so-called "toxic" bundles of sub-prime mortgages, defrauding multiple thousands of investors (including public and corporate retirement plans) out of billions of dollars in investment cash, and not one of the responsible white collar criminals spent a day in jail, let alone losing one of their multiple homes. So the over-extended home "owner" who may well have been talked into a mortgage she couldn't afford, or lost a job thanks to Wall Street machinations over which she had no control, becomes homeless and the bankers responsible get bonuses and vacations on tax-free islands.

These are not isolated instances, it is now defacto federal policy to impose fines on companies that violate the law and not prosecute the human beings who schemed to defraud. While the fines may run into the millions, they amount to days — sometimes mere minutes — of profit for the investment banks on Wall Street, and are simply a cost of doing business. Bizarrely, even our president seems to endorse this enforcement failure. 

In Matt Taibbi's excellent new book, “The Divide,” he notes that on the Dec. 11, 2011 edition of “60 Minutes,” Obama said: "I can tell you, just from 40,000 feet, that some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street, some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street, wasn't illegal." So because "some" of the behavior wasn't illegal, no one gets prosecuted for the part that was?

My guess is that "some" of the behavior of the low level drug dealer, the food server and the homeowner wasn't illegal either, but the full weight of the law is crushing the lower and middle classes in this country. 

Stop-and-frisk, invasive searches for food stamp applicants, traffic stops for people driving-while-black, confiscation of vehicles due to credit card debt, and many other everyday injustices demonstrate the failure of equality under the law — a basic tenet of democratic governance.

It is a failure that bodes poorly for our future as a nation.

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Cecil Bothwell, author of nine books, including “She Walks On Water: A novel” (Brave Ulysses Books, 2013), is a member of Asheville City Council.