While I don’t support the death penalty ( I don’t trust the government with it ), I do think high level white collar crime deserve a life sentence. I also think that the fines levied should at a bare minimum be enough to eliminate any profit from of crime; none of this take a hundred million and leave him 900 million nonsense. As for why they don’t and won’t get the death penalty, it’s because America is pretty much an aristocracy. The elite class is punished less than the commoners. Privilige in action.
as a footnote to my posts. I am not favouring or opposing death penalty (I can save those for the pertinent discussion). I am just saying that white collar crimes should be punished at least as severely as violent crimes because their scope and consequences can be larger.
I’d say that (for example) knowingly using substandard parts in construction of a building that later suffers a cataclysmic structural failure would be both murder, and a white collar crime.
I’d say the difference in perception and therefore punishments between a purely financial act and other criminal activities is the feeling of personal violation.
If a burglar were to break into my home, and cause me $5,000 of loss in damage and theft, I’d suffer disproportionately to the monetary value of my losses. The security of my home has been violated. My privacy has been destroyed by a stranger. Items of sentimental value fair exceeding their actual market value may be lost. Even if it’s all covered by insurance, even if they catch the guy and give me back the stuff, I’m still harmed in a very visceral way. Crimes against my person or my tangible personal property affect me way back in my lizard brain.
In contrast, I don’t have that much attachment to the numbers in my portfolio. If someone where to steal from me in such an abstract manner, it doesn’t hit me in the gut like that, even if they steal much more than the above burglar did. The crooked CEO or accountant wasn’t in my house. He wasn’t rifling through my wife’s underwear drawer. I don’t fear that he’ll come back and hurt my kids. I appreciate that the difference vanishes when one’s entire livelihood or savings is wiped out, but most white collar crime isn’t as drastic as all that.
In a perfectly rational world, criminals would be punished is accordance to the monetary damage they cause their victims. But we don’t live in a perfectly rational world. The mugger harms his victim in ways other than the cash he takes or the bodily wounds he inflicts.
Everyone’s “votes” are for sale. You prefer the side or person that gives you preferential treatment.
White collar is a kind of violence, I suppose we could argue. It takes a special kind of person to sign a paper and put people out of jobs to line his pockets. It takes a kind of psychopath to act without regard for the people that make the business go. It’s hubris of the highes t degree to think that you’re the only reason that the company is going strong and that you deserve more money, even if oyu have to take it. These kinds of people, and ones like them, are just the white collar equivalent of a mugger, rapist, or murderer.
What I was asking, since you changed the terms, is where do white collar crime and blue collar crime mix? It seems that you’re saying that those two lines never intersect. You did say that the use of force makes a crime much more serious. Both crimes, therefore are serious, and it stands to reason that a person that embezzles millions upon millions of dollars is as bad as a street tough that steals a candy bar have “force” in common. It just seems to be the amount.
This is after the post where you said that there was no force in white collar crime, for the record.
This statement might need further clarification.
So let’s say that losing your portfolio makes it impossible for you to retire/send your kids to college/get a new car/get a new house/pay for grandma’s emergency plunger removal surgery. That’s NOT going to drastically hit you?
Does the 3 strikes and your out provision apply to white collar crime?
No, but most white collar crime isn’t that drastic. Most of it is much more petty, and doesn’t wipe out its victims like that. Judging white collar crime by Enron is like judging blue collar crime by Dillinger. As long as I’m not financially ruined, I’d rather lose $25,000 by someone monkeying with my portfolio than $5,000 by breaking into my home. The portfolio… It’s just numbers. Rather important ones, but nothing compared to my health or home, or even my other personal posessions. Those have a primal tangibility.
Barring personal injury, how is it that you prefer to lose $25K to losing your TV and Stereo? Can’t you buy a bunch of them with the $25K?
I’m attached to my personal possessions beyond their simple financial value.
More than that, I’m attached to the idea that my home is safe and my privacy secure. The idea that someone was in my home going through my stuff harms me in a way that’s much greater than the financial damage done by the thief. It’s not rational, and I’m not even sure it’s right, but it is so. Obviously, there’s some point where purely financial damage from messing with my more abstract assets becomes greater than the emotional harm done by violating my home or person, but I can’t say where that is.
Well, I suppose it’s fair enough, but it makes for a hard point to debate because it’s a feeling.
And, of course, I disagree with your feeling, but I understand what you’re saying.
I would note that the arguments against putting them in the general population of a PMITA prison with violent offenders do not apply to 24/7 solitary confinement…
If they steal enough, the security of your home is most certainly violated (when it ain’t your home no more after the foreclosure proceedings).
White collar criminals aren’t dangerous to be around, their crimes usually revolve around the power they had which has very likely been lost by their conviction. The difference isnt simply “a white collar crime will cost me a lot more than a blue collar one”, you don’t get shot when a white collar crime goes wrong, your wife might lose her life savings but she won’t get raped and murdered by some sick fuck, your children might not go to college but they will not get run over by a getaway car. Financial ruin just doesn’t compare to the kinds of problems violent crime causes and shouldn’t be treated the same. Personally i feel the punishment should be a financial one rather than jail time when absolutely no violence or threat of violence is used, the enron guys should spend the rest of their lives working at a menial job with almost every cent of spare cash they make going to the people they ruined, but spending a day in jail is just not necesary.
All I can say is that you have a big difference of opinion with other people on this matter especially me. My family has a rather inexplicable ability to become the targets of violent crimes even though we are just a white middle-class family.
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My father was kidnapped randomly by a man that hid in the back of his car at a convenience store and held hostage overnight and the man finally tried to kill my father and another woman which was thwarted when my father fought back. The man got life in prison.
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I was the “victim” of an attempted armed robbery by two men but I also fought back and was successful. They got 3 years and 5 years respectively.
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My grandfather and his ex-wife were held hostage in their rather isolated home, robbed, and then tied to chairs and then left. The man was killed in a shootout with police later that night.
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My grandmother on my father’s side had a man break down the door in the middle of the night and hold her hostage. She decided to sooth him and he eventually fell asleep early in the morning and she escaped to a neighbors. He had drug and mental problems and I don’t think a lot ever came of it.
Now all of these things are plenty to shake you up for a while but I don’t consider them in the same league with losing most everything you had toiled for years or decades and I am sure that other people how have experienced similar things feel the same way. You can ask my grandfather for a direct comparison. He later had a business partner cash out and flee the country with $500,000 of his money. He was 62 years old at the time and now, at 80, he just announced over Christmas that he finally worked enough to get it all back. I don’t understand the elevation over violent crime over other types unless there is permanent death, dismemberment, or other trauma like rape. I would take 100 of those again before I would forgo my house, the ability to travel to see family, and the privilege of not working when I am too old to reasonably do so.
Violent crime can just come and go in a matter of minutes or hours. Having someone steal your hard-earned can affect you and your family greatly for life.
You think that way because all those situations luckily had a good outcome, but the chance of life loss was definitely there. Sure, ill take getting mugged ten times for 500 bucks each over getting scammed out of 500,000 once, but if each of those muggins has a 10% chance of ending with you getting shot would you still feel the same way? My point wasn’t that violent crime always results in physical harm or death, but that there is a chance that it will that doesn’t exist at all in white collar crime. If you or one of you loved ones had ended up dead, which happens with violent crime every single day you would consider your life savings meaningless.
Fair enough but I think a conspiracy that will deliberately affect the quality of life for untold numbers of people still counts as a greater harm than a single person getting killed in a robbery turned bad. I don’t make a hard distinction between death or bodily harm and large conspiracies that destroy lives in other ways.
Crimes like Enron are actually a form of retroactive slavery which is a crime that most people put in the heinous category. Employees worked and then contributed money to their 401k plan to store value that they needed for later life. Enron later stole the money that they worked for meaning that employees were working part-time to earn money not for themselves, but for their masters and they had no knowledge of it. The use of the term slavery fits because people’s labor was set up to benefit only those that controlled the system in a direct monetary sense.
I fail to see the difference between an unarmed guy breaking into my home with intent to steal my jewelry, and an unarmed guy breaking into my checking account with intent to steal my money. In fact, I’m actually more terrified of the latter because he could easily leave me penniless, in a matter of seconds, whereas the burgular cannot. I’ve been a victim of both identity fraud and repeated burgularies. Both kinds of crimes are highly stressful, harrowing, and violate one’s self of security. So I think they should be treated similarly.
Weighing the “fear” evoked from one kind of crime to another is meaningless in this discussion, anyway. The idea of someone holding me hostage and repeatedly raping me is far more scarier than him/her murdering me in cold blood. But I don’t think first-degree murder should take a backseat to false imprisonment and rape.
I think it’s only fair that if people want a “three strikes” policy towards certain non-violent felonies, they include serious white-collar crimes. So if Martha Stewart gets caught redhanded two more times, her butt is going to jail for life. I personally don’t agree with three-strikes, but I’m all for fairness and consistency.
The fact that the former can easily cause the latter (for the obvious reason that destitution forces people to live in crime pits) negates that distinction when white-collar crime reaches that point, IMO.
I think most people can agree that violence or the direct threat of violence are worse than theft by itself. We’d agree that the mugger who takes $100 from you at gunpoint should get a worse punishment than either the pickpocket who takes $100 or the petty corporate criminal that somehow takes $100 from you.
But some white-collar crime operates on a massive scale (not all, or even most, I’d guess, there’s a trend in this thread to see all WCC in terms of Enron, while all other crimes are in terms of petty thieves. Is it right that Schilling gets a lesser punishment than Gotti or Bundy?) . The question becomes, how do we scale up the punishment for non-violent crimes? How do we punish the con artist who steals millions more than the con artist who steals a couple thousand? Should we? Is the lesser criminal really “better” than the corporate crook, or did he just not have the same opportunities?
The real point of prison, more than deterrence, rehabilitation, or retribution, is simply to get the criminals away from the law abiding public for a time. Once caught, a spectacular white collar criminal will likely never have the opportunity to steal in such a manner again. His career is ruined (who would hire him? And where applicable his actions can be curtailed by law), and most of his assets should be seized to pay off his debtors. He can’t simply walk out on the street and start ripping off investors again, the way a rapist may start looking for a new victim.
Assuming that all possible efforts are made to seize and return the stolen funds, I don’t have much of a problem with shorter sentences for all non-violent crimes. As for “club fed” type prisons, I think that the type of prison one goes to should be based on the risk of escape, not the crime per se. If corporate criminals are really less likely than rapists and drug dealers to try and escape (which is an assumption I wouldn’t mind seeing backed up by actually data), then I don’t really see the problem with putting them in minimum security prisons.