I was just wondering, are there any purely white-collar federal crimes, with mandatory minimum sentences? I think we can agree on a definition of purely white-collar: where no violence, no true desperation (i.e., hunger, etc.) is involved. And, yes, it is also the kind of crime that only a rich person would commit.
And I put this in GD, because I have another question: How do the politicians who write these statutes justify them, and how do they sleep at night? You don’t have to answer that last one. But you can, because I truly wonder.
The reason white-collar crimes get punished less severely than violent crimes, is because we generally recognize that people are more important than money. You let a rapist out early because you assume that he learned his lesson, and it turns out that you guessed wrong – congratulations, you just enabled another rape. With a white-collar criminal, the realistic worst-case scenario is less severe, by most people’s standards.
Furthermore, people who have been convicted of e.g. committing fraud while working as an accountant, usually lose their job and will have a lot of trouble getting another accountancy job. So the recidivism problem largely solves itself, simply by making the conviction publicly known; you don’t actually need to keep the person locked up in prison in order to prevent them from committing fraud again. Another way to look at this is that white-collar criminals have more to lose in terms of reputation etc, so the actual prison sentence needs to be only a small portion of their total punishment.
