Last month, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced that the Department of Justice will be going hard after corporate crime, white-collar criminals and Wall Street fraud.

This statement implies that up until now, the Department of Justice was sitting on its butt — an accurate inference if there ever was one. Yates and her boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, are known for being aggressive. Surely they could rack up prosecutions among Wall Street power players and bring justice to our predatory financial system?

Unlikely. And even if they did throw some fat felines in jail, it wouldn’t necessarily mean much, as showy criminal prosecutions are generally just ersatz for real financial reform. Although indictments may help the careers of a few high-stepping U.S. attorneys (the rise of Rudy Giuliani, who gloried in perp-walking white-collar defendants, comes to mind) the results are likely to net some hapless schmucks in middle management but sure to leave the system largely in place.

It’s going to take a lot more than criminal law to turn our financial system into something other than a bloated parasite. There are — or at least were, back in 2009 — plenty of options: Break up the big banks! (Plenty of conservatives support that.) Imitate key features of the Northern European social market economies and Germany’s Rhineland capitalism model by embracing public-spirited regulation. Tax financial transactions.

But the financial crisis went to waste. Instead of meaningful reform, the bailout was followed by an uptick in high-profile prosecutions for insider trading, with stiffer sentences than ever before. Which is just great — if we allow ourselves to forget that insider trading had nothing to do with the financial crash. Forgive me, but I’ve started cheering for the inside traders or, rather, against the preening U.S. attorneys, just out of spite.

The fixation on prosecutions that we’re now left with reveals a failure of vision and a failure of ambition. Meanwhile, the let’s-prosecute-the-banksters think piece has become a flourishing subgenre in its own right. The undisputed master is Jed Rakoff, a federal judge and former defense attorney for white-collar defendants. He’s a fine judge, and as a former white-collar defense attorney, he knows criminal law better than anyone. But it’s telling that in a long article he wrote for The New York Review of Books last year, he barely mentions the kinds of systemic, structural reforms — from the moderate (breaking up the biggest banks) to the more ambitious (nationalization) — that are needed to truly change American financial markets. In a lunch interview he recently granted The Financial Times, he even bemoaned U.S. incarceration rates, all while calling for more prosecutions for corporate crime.

Our financial system, even absent straight-up crime, is a wonderfully efficient system for upwardly redistributing money into the portfolios of the 1 percent. The focus on prosecutions only preserves the fiction that our financial system is fundamentally OK and that anything bad that happens — say, an enormous asset bubble collapse — must be the result of criminals. There is a bit of the just-law fallacy at work here, the deeply held American folk belief that our legal system, including the regulatory latticework of laws that makes our financial system possible, is by nature fair and decent. That, alas, is a superstition.