Comment by jkaplowitz
6 months ago
Yes. It’s just money, which is why I want non-imprisonment punishments for any of those scenarios, unless prison would usefully achieve some remedial goal like making your car theft example less likely to recur because the person is locked up.
There are lots of better ways to punish this kind of crime, generally. Imprisonment doesn’t get my money back, is expensive for the taxpayer, is at least as likely to make the criminal more prone to reoffend as less prone to that given how typical American prisons work, and isn’t necessary for either retributive or deterrent purposes.
Their criminal record, any court order to pay compensatory and punitive damages, any loss of their own property or bankruptcy that results, and so on would be plenty of retribution and deterrence.
Now, if they try to flee from justice or violate court orders or hide assets in ways that imprisonment would usefully interfere with, that’s a different question. Prison makes sense in many cases, but merely making the victims of a nonviolent monetary crime feel satisfied is not inherently such a case.
Idk man I guess you’re a different kind of guy but I have precisely ZERO problems with putting the con artists that targeted my grandma in prison.
They’re gonna keep doing it.
I’m sorry to hear your grandma got targeted by con artists, but it’s a rare scam where imprisoning the few individuals who are actually within reach of arrest and who generate enough usable evidence to convict them will meaningfully protect the scam’s potential future victims. In those rare cases, imprisonment might well be appropriate.
I don’t see signs of that in the case we are discussing. This crime was a crime of opportunity against a large corporation causing only monetary harm to the corporation in the form of inconvenience and time wasted for its employees to clean up the mess, but not ruining anyone or anything beyond coworkers’ account profile settings, not even anyone’s paychecks.
Certainly this case was worthy of punishment, definitely worthy of the felony criminal conviction and potential damages if the employer wants to sue or if this criminal statute lets the court include that in the sentence, likely worthy of temporarily or permanently keeping him away from employer computer systems beyond something heavily locked down (e.g. point of sale screen), and maybe also temporarily or permanently away from computers or the internet in general if that won’t unreasonably prevent him from having some viable way of making a living, but not worthy of imprisonment without more reason for that.
I haven't even really been discussing the case from the OP. I'm more so just surprised at the number of comments (like yourself) that appear to be expressing sympathy for financial or white collar criminals.
I suppose it's a philosophical difference...I just hope that you appreciate how extreme the position is. The amount of fraud in this country is disturbing and I don't think it is compassionate/kind at all to keep these people out of prison while most people are struggling to make an honest living. It creates a moral hazard.
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