More than a weekend for Bernie: Madoff gets 150 years

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Great title

You know, as much as I despise what the man has done--I had a minibar sentence was decrying his actions for months--I think it's wasteful, shortsighted and revengeful to warehouse him, or any other non-violent offenders. Madoff should be living in a halfway house, on his own dime, and doing public service and activities that go toward paying his victims back. In jail, he's completely useless, and he costs us taxpayers even more. He's quite a talented guy;he should be put to good use serving the public.

Why don't we have less cavemanish ways to deal with nonviolent offenders?

Yep.

+1

I would totally agree with you had this case not included victims.

In this case, it's because of the less cavemanish punishments that sick fucks like him (including those at Enron) do what they do to the public.

I would want similar punishments for those who scam the elderly out of retirement money for "sure bet investments" and other scams.

Are there really any truly victimless crimes? I don't think so. But, more to the point, aren't there punitive measures that are actually useful to victims? I think so, like I said in my earlier post.

Just sayin.

-TM

Wildswan, I think there are crimes that are somewhat victimless: Late paying taxes, most drug-related crimes (usage/buying/selling), and I'm sure there are more. I just can't think of any on the spot right now.

But back to your original suggestion of how to handle Madoff, I want to make sure I understand you correctly. Are you suggesting that if you swindle millions of dollars from the public, that the only consequence for getting caught is giving the money back and having to stay at a halfway house? Just because he's smart/intelligent?

I understand your good intent of having him serve the public...but hasn't he demonstrated that he's not exactly trustworthy that way? Unless, of course, you are suggesting he pick up trash off the streets n' stuff.

It's a deterrence issue, primarily. The idea (and I don't know that empirical research exists to confirm or rebut this idea, I'm just saying) is that there is a class of people out there who may commit a white collar crime if they think they're going to end up in a halfway house but may not if they think they'll end up in a FPMITA prison amongst the general populace of murderers and thugs. Again, I don't know the research, but viscerally there's probably something to that idea.

Now, that doesn't negate the policy implications of having a prison-industrial complex that herds people in like cattle for violent and non-violent crimes alike, but I think it's a reasonable counter-point.

Yes, but this title was soooo much better

i think you make an excellent point. The "sentence" is a form of penance or reparation as much as it is "punishment." It's unclear why every punishment should be born by taxpayers (I can confirm that I have not become one of those libertarians) when in fact offenders may have something to contribute. I am in favor of tapping intellectual and physical capital versus segregating it/them into facilities where they waste away.

Hmmm. You raise a good point, one that was notably used by Madoff's defense team (which, of course, is not meant to imply that you are somehow defending Bernie Madoff). However, Madoff has become a symbol for the cause of the economic recession, and this is the main reason why his prison sentence is so lengthy. Beyond the fact that Madoff's fraud went on for decades and evaporated so many people's life savings, his imprisonment is one of many commonly occuring populists efforts to disrupt and challenge the common practice of economic exploitation of middle and lower classes. We don't often get legal recourse against these kinds of criminals, so when we do, we go for blood.

It's also true that the victim's unequivocally desired the long sentence. I'm unsure as to how much their opinions should be taken into consideration. The anger that comes from being victimized does not serve justice well.

I still stand by my subtitle.

Back on topic...Hey, fuck him.

-TM

But is this really going for blood ? he is going to put up in a federal prison for the very short remainder of his life. Certainly its not paradise, and losing your freedom can be very traumatizing, but its not like he is going to be tortured or harmed in any sort of official capacity. He is just going to spend his days sleeping, eating, making license plates or doing laundry etc., eating, whatever prisoners do in the afternoon, eating, then sleeping.

Personally if it was up to me, i would set him to work for habitat for humanity or something similar so that he could make some sort of contribution to society at large. I agree with wildswan, lets not simply lock him away.

So, to sum this up:

Physical abuse/damage against innocent victimes = rot in prison.

Severe emotional or severe financial abuse against victims = Hey, go easy on them. It's not like they ruined anyone's lives or anything....oops killed anyone. Maybe a halfway house or a little community service?

I'm pretty sure the latter of the two scenarios will see a drastic drop in those kinds of crimes with that plan.

I'm not advocating a soft, cushy life for Mr. Made-off-with-people's-life savings-and-even-bilked-charities-including-Elie Wiesel's. I'm saying that traditional incarceration isn't going to ameliorate the financial outlooks of his victims. If I were a victim of Madoff, I'd want him to be doing something to mitigate the damage done to my fiscal health.

If I were a corporate criminal, I'd be greatly deterred by the prospect of spending the remainder of my life in alternative incarceration, exchanging my previous cushy life for working the remainder of my days repaying my victims in a pauper's lifestye.

I mean, couldn't the prosecutors have come up with some creative deals? As I understand it, Madoff is sitting on the valuable information about where those assets are. He has no incentive, now, to tell where the bulk of those assets are.


Also, I don't know how much the 'smartest guys in the room' personalities are prone to what the average person would be deterred by. I just think there are so many ways to punish him and coerce him into ways of trying to make his victims whole again--as whole as possible.


*This is no expression of sympathy for the man.

Ugh, I am reading stories/reports of some of the victims.

It appears that due to our overly-complicated laws, there are loopholes which do not protect those who aren't "direct investors." Meaning if you are like this one 80 yr old retired engineer who put their complete life savings in the hands of a consultant - you are out fucked and have to work at Safeway as a butcher making less than $9 an hour to pay your bills.

Maybe we should spend more time closing loopholes rather than finding less severe punishments for ass maggots who fuck the public over.

The underlined is a vital point: when the anger--an emotion that can fog decision making--is drained off, those people will still be in need of pragmatic reparations, and not some guy sitting in traditional punishment.

I can't help but to think it's not just a pipe dream to think that this man could recover these people losses, pay for his own punishment, and pay the public at large back for what it has cost us to try him.

^^^ Couldn't he do this in a traditional incarceration setting?

As I've tried to make very clear: it's not about making the punishment less severe; it's about finding creative, more constructive ways of paying society back. I think the blood lust is a vain attempt and purging society's anger, and that don't pay bills.

Why would he? Were is the incentive?

We make deals with freaking serial killers--deals that render the practical punishment the same as someone who has committed a much lesser crime, just so that the guy will say where he dumped victim's bodies. Sometimes that's the best that can be done because the victim's family need to know that important information, and that's the only way to get it.

Atonement? I'm serious about that answer.

I dunno, wildswan. At best, Madoff has about 20 years of life left in him. It seems unlikely he could earn back the money that he squandered over so much time. Also, if a house arrest arrangement was made for him, how would we measure his ability to remain on house arrest? By how much money he earns off of his investments? If he didn't earn enough, would we put him in jail?

It's up to his attorneys to propose this sort of scenario, and they did no such thing. Granted, I don't know if such a thing is ever done (except in that movie Catch Me if you Can), but it still strikes me as the responsibility of the defense.

I think you've got your heart in the right place, but are still ultimately wrong, for two reasons. First, the practical reason: your desire for him to earn back money is undercut by the fact that the reason he's in jail is because he was never very good at earning money in the first place. His talent consisted in convincing people he could, rather than actually fulfilling on said pledge. While it's admittedly possible to be a gifted con artist and a brilliant hedge fund manager, one doesn't usually rely on the former for income if you can rely on the latter.

The second, more theoretical reason is that what you're suggesting, when stripped away of the particulars, is that we tailor the punishment to the skills of the punished. There is a certain logic to this, I'll admit. But at the same time, it results in dramatically uneven punishment, as more skilled workers get what amounts to work release, with what I assume is the condition that they do the job they are prescribed well or they get tossed in a jail cell, while those with no real skills simply skip a step and move to the cell block. Insofar as we don't believe that some people are more valuable than others by law, we shouldn't, therefore, incorporate a legal standard of punishment which dispenses differing standards of justice.

Can someone please explain why the courts dole out these improbably long sentences? The man's not going to live that long, and it just seems contrary to common sense to give out a sentence longer than the average human lifespan.

Also, is there any difference between a life sentence and a 150 sentence in terms of the law?