So Bernie Madoff gets sentenced to 150 years in prison for his swindle, and the judge says that the verdict sends a message "that Mr. Madoff's crimes were extraordinarily evil."
No, it doesn't.
A 150 year prison sentence is incomprehensible. It's a number that you just can't compute; it doesn't fit into any reasonable comparison or equation. We don't measure anything in 150 year increments, let alone a human life. Prison itself is hard to understand, especially the sort of place that a white-collar criminal auteur like Madoff might call home. Will his minimum-security apartment lack a widescreen TV?
There's just this disconnect between the crime and the punishment or, for that matter, simply the two events. It's similar to the disconnects going on in lots of news these days, like GM squandering billions, getting billions more from taxpayers, and then declaring bankruptcy. How about the big financial institutions' bad lending, getting bailouts, and then raising every fee that isn't etched in stone (and avoiding the lending said bailouts were supposed to prompt)?
No, when we get told things that just don't compute, our natural inclination is to question credibility, at best, and suspect falsehood and conspiracy, more than likely. There's almost a rolling narrative into which we put, and then can connect, all the recent news relating to the economy. The high-concept for this movie we're watching goes something like this:
Rapacious corporate interests rob the little guy, over and over, and never get punished.
I know it's not true (gulp), but when the punishment doesn't even hint at coming close to matching the crime, it's hard not to lose at least a little faith.
I'm not advocating that Madoff should get the rack, or sit in an iron maiden. Torture isn't allowed (we only used it on suspects, remember?), and who cares if a 71-year-old financier screams out in pain? It would be pitiful and hollow, and no amount of his suffering would equal the suffering he caused to his victims.
No, the real punishment would be to go after the people he enriched.
A Ponzi scheme has to keep people happy in order to survive. Madoff was expert at collecting money from new investors, and using it to pay to older investors; you know, all of those numbnuts who couldn't read a financial statement, and believed Madoff's promises of unimaginably impossible returns. The money Madoff used to make their dreams of riches come true came from newer victims, who were thus more likely to be among the ruined when the scam collapsed. They didn't have enough time to get paid-off by even newer victims.
Buying stolen property is a crime, as long as it can be proven that the purchaser should have "reasonably" known the goods had been illegally acquired. Well, what were Madoff's promised investment returns? Nobody understood how he could do it -- his payoffs defied every reasonable explanation, and flew in the face of every tidbit of financial teaching, history, and news -- yet his early investors were happy to ignore such disconnects because the money was so good.
If any petty criminal bought a TV that only cost $.10 on the dollar, or sold a car for a price that no legitimate seller could match, the case would be simple: they shoulda known better. When things are too good to be true, they usually are. So why is it we hear so much about regular-guy victims who are willing to stand outside a courtroom and yell, and not the rich folks whom he helped pocket billions of ill-begotten funds?
Making the beneficiaries of the Ponzi scheme pay (or simply return their stolen goods) would make a lot more sense. Madoff is a bad guy and he should rot in jail, but the "extraordinary evil" of his crime was that others were allowed to profit from it.
