The megabanks are finally feeling the hurt for the depredations of the mortgage era. That’s what the government, and some in the financial press, too, would have us believe. Bank of America on Thursday announced a whopping $16.65 billion settlement with the Justice Department, topping the previous record of $13 billion paid to the government by J.P. Morgan. Citigroup has handed over $7 billion, and Wells Fargo and others are likely to strike settlement deals next. Says The New York Times: “Prosecutors are getting creative in holding the nation’s big banks accountable.” They are indeed—and that’s the problem.

It bears saying one more time: It’s a disgrace that the Justice Department has failed to bring a single criminal charge against any Wall Street or mortgage executive of consequence for their roles in wrecking the economy, despite having managed to make arrests in the comparatively piddling schemes of Enron and the Savings & Loan flimflam. (The latter resulted in more than 800 convictions, including those of many top executives.) These settlements are wan consolation. The sums being surrendered, for starters, are large only until compared with the $13 trillion or so the public lost in the financial crash—or, for that matter, with the banks’ own coffers. (Citi’s pure profit in the two years before the wipeout was more than triple its penalty.) Not to mention that the money won’t be paid by any parties actually responsible, but by the banks’ current shareholders, who pretty much had nothing to do with the misdeeds in question. And the bulk of the settlements will be tax deductible. For destroying trillions in wealth and thousands of jobs, banks will get a write-off.

There’s a much deeper problem here, however, and one that has received far less attention: Not only has the Department of Jus­tice (DOJ) failed to build any criminal cases for financial-crisis misdeeds, but it’s also now settling with these banks without even filing civil complaints. A complaint is the cornerstone of civil litigation, the foundation for even routine lawsuits. One of its primary benefits—and of adversarial legal proceedings generally—is that a complaint can bring huge amounts of previously undisclosed information into the public record. In these mortgage securities cases, the Justice Department had not only an obligation but an opportunity: to show the country what it found, to deter future misconduct, to complete the story of the financial crisis in humanizing, clarifying, searing detail. And to do all that, the department didn’t need to do anything special. Just what lawyers normally do. Instead, by imposing a fine without documenting the underlying abuses, the Justice Department has permitted the banks, for a price, to bury their sins.

One way to appreciate the DOJ’s negligence is to compare these settlements with the civil action that New York’s Department of Financial Services brought against the French banking giant BNP Paribas a few weeks before the Citi deal was announced. The state accused BNP of concealing more than $190 billion in transactions that allowed warlords, mullahs, and other miscreants to evade U.S. sanctions and spirit money in and out of Sudan, Iran, and Cuba. We know which executive did what bad thing when, because it’s all laid out in a consent order, complete with the de rigueur damning e-mails. In one of them, the head of ethics and compliance for the bank’s North American unit expressed his glee at another bank’s bust for sanctions evasion: “The dirty little secret isn’t so secret any more, oui?” he wrote to a colleague. Now BNP’s own dirty little secrets have been exposed as well. In a press release accompanying the filing, the regulator gives the name of that compliance officer, Stephen Strombelline, along with those of four other executives fired as a result of the investigation, including the bank’s chief operating officer, Georges Chodron de Courcel.

In announcing the BNP penalty, New York’s superintendent of financial services, Benjamin M. Lawsky, made the following observation: “In order to deter future offenses, it is important to remember that banks do not commit misconduct—bankers do.” Many of his predecessors in white-collar law enforcement also understood the corrective power of publicity. Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken became household names in the 1980s because of the riveting civil complaints brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), an agency that evoked a fear on Wall Street that is hard to imagine today. Robert M. Morgenthau, the legendary Manhattan district attorney, is legendary partly for actually sending bankers to prison, but he also pursued devastating civil suits against wayward financiers. The sweeping white-collar civil complaints that Eliot Spitzer filed as New York’s attorney general read like detective novels; his blockbuster settlement with American International Group was preceded by a lawsuit that explicitly targeted the titan Maurice R. “Hank” Greenberg, to Greenberg’s everlasting fury.