Comment by jkaplowitz

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.