Madoff sentenced to hell

Or maybe not quite hell - Bernie Madoff got 150 years today - but if hell had been an option, I'm sure that most people would have cheered such a sentence. Or, perhaps, like Prometheus, he could have been chained to a rock at the end of the world for a few thousand years with his guts eaten out of him every day by vultures, only to be replaced overnight so the punishment could begin anew each day. Would that have brought the money back?

Madoff is clearly a world-class asshole. I have a hard time understanding how he could have even perpetrated such a collosal swindle without being some kind of psychopath, in a certified, DSM-IV kind of way. What he did was despicable and disgusting, an infliction of suffering if not, as Judge Chin would have it, "extraordinarily evil," than at least ordinarily evil.

But I wonder, what is the price of freedom? I mean freedom in the sense of not being in prison. Can we put a price tag on the workaday freedom that we all take for granted? Being able to go outside, walk to the store, see a movie, make love to our wife, go to the library, call friends on the phone, have a beer, work? What is that worth?

Well, if Bernie's scam was worth $65 billion, and he got 150 years, the cost of freedom in the United States in 2009 is $1,187,214.61 per day.

Maybe that kind of reckoning doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it makes about as much sense, to me, as someone getting 150 years in prison - for any crime. That's supposed to make us feel better? That he won't even be up for parole until he's been dead for a hundred years?

We're told that this sentence, which was the harshest possible under the law, will deter other fraudsters. What a load of horseshit. Like I said, Madoff is probably a psychopath. What deters such a person from anything? This sentence is ridiculous mob-justice, period. What happened to life in prison, which is what this sentence is, of course?

Or what happened to letting the punishment fit the crime? Why not send Bernie to jail for a while, take every last penny from him (mostly already done, or underway) and everyone who benefited from his fraud and pay back as much of the money as possible. Then, let him out of prison and give him an electronic bracelet, a shitty apartment and a shittier job, perhaps something that involves actually working with, and having to touch, shit. When did the answer to every conceivable crime in this country become lock them up for ever!

The United States has the highest documented prison population in the world. Not per capita; the highest in raw numbers! China ranks second - and they have a population of 1.3 billion people. We need prison reform in our country, desperately; our habit of locking people up is a sad legacy, especially given our stated values as a nation and as a people.

It does not need to be this way in order to teach people like Bernie Madoff a lesson. Let's use some common sense. And while we're on the subject - I said what he did was terrible, even evil - but people might also want to consider that something that looks too good to be true, like double digit returns on investment for years at a time, probably is! I am not blaming the victims for Madoff's scam, but his fraud certainly does not seem to have been particularly sophisticated. It was garden variety bullshit and people just spread it around and spread it around for twenty years.

Insanely greedy bastards who rob people need to be punished. Doing so is also a fine opportunity to consider the ways in which greed blinds us all.