Hook em and book em
I read a lot about crime, and cops, and how the cultures of criminality evolve.
Today Sam Bankman Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The judge cited his lack of remorse for his massive (massive) fraud. But it’s always a tough one - how to punish a financial crime vs crimes against the person. There are stabbers and rapists who get less than 25 years. Bankman Fried is a crook, but is he worse than a child molester? (Or to put it another way, who would I feel safer living next door to?).
The pendulum has been swinging away from long sentences for many crimes, with many advocating for diversion programs, ways to keep criminals out of prison. It’s hard to square that with a non-violent first offender getting a long sentence. But I doubt the reformers will be out protesting for Bankman Fried.
This morning I was speaking about pirates, and how the piracy that evolved in the 1600s was at least partly a response to incentives (there were valuable ships available to steal, and a good chance of outrunning/evading what limited legal structures existed).
Much financial crime follows this model - from robbing strangers to embezzling from their workplace. People think they won’t get caught, and/or are surrounded by others whose moral compass tells them what they are doing is ok. (If you join up with pirates, the peer pressure is likely to be pro-piracy).
For someone like Bankman Fried, he received adulation (helped along by his generous political donations). People told him what he was doing was right and amazing and at the new frontier of tech and finance and all the usual Silicon Valley BS. Plenty of other weirdos have stumbled into a fortune.
Of course he didn’t stumble, he in fact seems to have a very focused worldview. An odd one, to be sure, but zealously held. I wrote about Bankman Fried when he was first arrested, and how his ponzi scheme was much like the old chain letter.
But the licensing, the permission he received - from those who are no doubt running fast to distance themselves from him now - was part of the issue. He was cheered on.
Which brings me back to old school piracy. Where there were pirates (bad, boo!) and there were privateers (also pirates, but pirates with permission slips). Bankman Fried got as far as he did because his message was not “I’m going to make a fortune and party with beautiful women” (he was living in a bizarre polycule), it was “I’m going to right the world’s wrongs through effective altruism”. It was a message that appealed to a lot of people, particularly in the tech world, which is full of the kind of individuals who write lengthy autistic posts about how the world would just be so much better if everyone would get with their “logical” worldview. Mostly they are harmless, but in Bankman Fried we saw truly weaponized the “reddit rationalist” worldview.
A 25 year sentence (no doubt to be appealed) of course is meant to deter those who would think to do the same thing.
Which brings us back to what we choose to deter (and what we choose to tolerate). Sam Bankman Fried was encouraged by society. Who else are we encouraging?
We are encouraging the politicians we keep electing. They are as crooked as he is and we pay them to steal from us.
The way I look at it is that rehabilitation is generally a waste of time. Criminal punishment should be primarily about either removing the offenders from society, or discouraging either active or potential offenders from offending again. SBF is not a violent man, but he stole a lot of money, and very likely will attempt to do such again as long as he thinks he can get away with such. A nice long snit in a real prison is exactly the sort of thing that could conceivably discourage him from thinking he can get away with such behavior again. But if he decides to ignore such a lesson, he'll at least have the decency to be out of our hair for a decent stretch of time.