“WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice is finally drawing the curtain on what may be its defining project of the Obama era: the refusal to prosecute Wall Street crime.

“Only one investment banker has been jailed over securities infractions tied to the financial crisis. Zero Wall Street executives were put behind bars. More than 1,000 bankers were convicted of crimes after the much smaller savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

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“Failing to prosecute Wall Street crime isn’t just a matter of fairness. Weakening or eliminating individual accountability for financial wrongdoing encourages bankers and traders to take bigger risks, particularly when the upside to an illegal maneuver could be millions of dollars in profits.

“Better late than never, but what an insult to the American people,” said Dennis Kelleher, referring to the DOJ memo. Kelleher is president and CEO of Better Markets, a financial reform watchdog.

“With DOJ, words mean nothing,” Kelleher warned. “Based on their past dereliction of duty, no one should believe anything DOJ says until they see actual, concrete and repeated prosecution of supervisors and executives at Wall Street’s biggest, wealthiest and most politically connected too-big-to-fail banks.”

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Read the full Huffington Post article by Zach Carter here.