Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernard Sanders on Tuesday said Wall Street executives should have been jailed for causing the economic meltdown in 2008.

“It is an outrage that not one major Wall Street executive has gone to jail for causing the near collapse of the economy. The failure to prosecute the crooks on Wall Street for their illegal and reckless behavior is a clear indictment of our broken criminal justice system,” Mr. Sanders said in a statement.

Mr. Sanders, a Vermont independent and self-described socialist running for the Democratic nomination, has mounted a formidable challenge to front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton with a liberal message rooted in fighting income inequality and taking on Wall Street.

The senator noted that former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had the same view.

Mr. Bernanke recently told USA Today: “Everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm. There should have been more accountability at the individual level.”

“I wish Ben Bernanke would have understood that when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve,” Mr. Sanders said.

“It is an obscenity that people in this country are getting arrested at near record rates for smoking marijuana, but not one Wall Street CEO has been prosecuted for triggering the Great Recession in 2008,” he said. “Millions of Americans lost their jobs, homes, life savings and ability to send their kids to college because of the greed on Wall Street. We can no longer tolerate a criminal justice system that treats Wall Street executives as too big to jail when their actions have ruined the lives of so many Americans.”

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