>
>I think it is much simpler than that. Dennis and fellow white collar
>criminals screwed up some other rich people, i.e. investors, and that is not
>acceptable in America.
I think this is a little too simple.
>These people do not give a flying fuck whether the
>Black or Hispanic communities are treated "justly" or not.
Of course they don't, but they can't get away with the blatant discrimination of drug laws forever. There's been a lot of talk about this lately. Like the excerpt below from last Saturday's International Herald Tribune (reprinted from the NYT) Another good article is Murder, Meth, Mammon, and Moral Values: The Political Landscape of American Sentencing Reform, abstracted here <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=720102>
[...]
Jonathan Simon, a professor of law at University of California, Berkeley, said: "The most obvious comparison for the emerging attitude toward white-collar criminals is the harsh punishment we give to people involved in the drug trade. But both represent increasingly irrational and inhumane levels of punishment."
The main argument for imposing lengthy sentences is that they serve as a warning to other executives. After Ebbers's conviction in July, Alan Hevesi, the New York state comptroller and court-appointed lead plaintiff in the WorldCom securities class action, said it was "important to send a strong message" because of the billions of dollars and thousands of jobs that were lost as a result of the fraud.
Yet Simon, for one, said he had doubts about whether an especially long sentence worked as a significantly greater deterrent to potential white-collar criminals than shorter periods.
He said that "it would be far more effective to impose a lot of short sentences on a wider group of offenders rather than the example model of harshly punishing a few celebrity cases while most potential offenders know that they are unlikely ever to be caught and punished."
Still, some prosecutors and lawyers suggest that lessons that were supposedly learned during the crackdown on corporate crime in the late 1980s did not stick, in part because the sentences were too lenient. Michael Milken was sentenced to three and a half years and served less than two.
[...]
<http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/16/business/tyco.php>