His parents who are professors of legal ethics? His mother is getting a long-term lesson in the theories of consequentialism that she is a supporter of.
If someone isn't a violent threat to society, there isn't much social benefit to keeping folks locked up longer then 20-ish years. 20-25 (assuming he gets the 15% off for good behavior the feds allow) is plenty.
not to be too unsympathetic but if those people he defrauded (which yes is a very bad thing) were all crypto degens gambling on things they knew they shouldnt be gambling on, does that change the calculus at all
The USA has an incredibly robust, tightly monitored and regulated financial market. The SEC, FDIC and associated regulators and auditors carefully control bank reserves, prosecute insider trading, prevent and insure against fraud.
Some people decided to opt-out of that system and send their money to an unregulated entity in the Bahamas to buy imaginary money without government oversight.
Honestly the government shouldn't have intervened here at all. The people who lost money should have been laughed at and told that's why you put your money in the regulated market. If you intentionally try to avoid taxes, anti-money laundering regulations, audits and securities law by buying crypto overseas, then taxpayer resources don't go bail you out.
If you ask to borrow $500 and I give it to you, and you run off with the money with no intent to ever pay me back, did you commit fraud? Or was I just a rube who should have known better?
You seem to wish to live in a zero trust world model where everyone is out to scam everyone at all times and "caveat emptor" if you do get scammed. We should do our best as a society to not turn into that.
I'm reading their comment as the opposite - there are mechanisms for a high trust society in place (which is good), but if you go out of your way to opt out of it then you're on your own.
The difference is there is no such thing as "unregulated" in the concept of fraud. Doing fraud is illegal. Even if FTX had done all the paperwork to be compliant, it would still be illegal fraud.
Same as there's no place where murder is allowed. You can't "opt out" of parts of society. It's not even "take it or leave it", society is "take it or get out of our reach"
I'm not sure I fully agree that we should just sit by and let them be robbed, but the point you make about the government doing nothing is an interesting one as it would be great marketing against a disruptive currency.
I agree. However, I think there's something to be said about how people don't understand what kind of protections are afforded to them by regulation.
A lot of these people were likely acting in some level of good faith, assuming that a company so big it could afford a Super Bowl commercial starring Larry David would never scam them. I know, it's stupid, but people don't understand where the guardrails are, what FDIC insurance really is, what sort of insurance exists on retail brokerage accounts, etc. And they didn't just lose money off of crypto losing value, they lost beyond that amount off of this business co-mingling funds when they were not supposed to.
But I do not feel that badly for anyone whose life was 'ruined' over this for one big reason: they were trying to get rich quick. That's the fact that underpins so much investment in crypto. BTC to the moon! SHTC to the moon! ETCC to the moon! These people were hoping for their 'investments' (speculative gamblings) to explode in value. And they weren't planning on sharing any of it with you or me, not beyond what they're legally required to through taxes (and sometimes, not even that, like you say as well).
The judge provided a good counterargument: if a thief burgles a bank, goes to Vegas and doubles his money and gives the original amount back to the bank, does that deserve punishment?
So he stole stuff in 2022 at a low point, and now his victims are going to be paid 30% the cost of what it would take to rebuy it? That's "repaid in full" in your mind? Losing 70% of their BTC?
I would easily go to jail for 8 years for $50+ million. 25 years would not be worth it to me for any amount.
I am from El Paso, which is on the border with Mexico and grew up with many kids whose parents were smugglers and cartel affiliated.
I know several parents who went to jail for ~10 years while were were in elementary school, the kids never wanted for anything, and then when the parents got out and started capital intensive business.
One parent did 12 years and got out to start a a series of high end mexican restaurants, one started a steakhouse, one bought a small hotel, one started a commercial construction company.
It's all part of the game, just how startup founders grind for years for the money.
Honestly? I sincerely doubt you, or anyone would actually, really, for realsies, go to prison for eight years for $50M. Anyone would beg to be released after a few weeks.
That is a complete middle class mindset. Jail is cool in the hood. I've done a few months for stupid stuff when I was young and it's not that bad.
People risk 10 years for robbing bands for a couple thousand. A guaranteed $10 million would have lines around the block for volunteers in the neighborhood I grew up in.
In terms of "ruins your life", anything past a few years does that.
Speaking purely for myself, I don't feel much difference in the deterrent effect from the punishment being 5 years or 25 years. Either one would utterly wreck everything about my life, and although the latter is worse it's not enough so to change my decisions.
If he gets out in 5 years he'll be doing the same thing. He showed no remorse or understanding that he did anything wrong. A 25 year sentence means we've got 20 more years of public safety.
Prisons are good for punishing criminals and keeping them off the street, but
prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime.
Prisons actually may have the opposite effect: Inmates learn more effective
crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize
many to the threat of future imprisonment.
See “Understanding the Relationship Between Sentencing and Deterrence” for
additional discussion on prison as an ineffective deterrent.
———
5. There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals.
According to the National Academy of Sciences, “Research on the deterrent
effect of capital punishment is uninformative about whether capital punishment
increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates.”
That is certainly correct for "street crime" where premeditation and risk reward analysis aren't a part of the equation.
I have some pretty serious doubts about it when it comes to large financial crimes where both those things are absolutely part of the process. A death sentence probably isn't going to stop someone from killing another person, they're already off the deep end of irrationality. However 25 years of prison is probably going to be a significant deterrent to someone choosing to commit billions worth of fraud, maybe the profit margin isn't that important.
Yeah, I really think comparing common street crime with high financial crime is Apples and Oranges. Common criminals don’t have much to lose, yes going to prison sucks, but it means less when you live in low income housing with other people, can’t afford basic shit and/or are in significant mental distress. On the other hand Financial criminals usually have a LOT to lose, and to get into the position to commit those crimes they likely have a degree of rationality that’s less guaranteed than in street crime.
Frankly, I think we need a lot more of this kind of punishment to get more trust back into our high-trust society. More rich people need to go to prison for crimes against society, because honestly it feels more like Madoff and SBF were one offs rather than business as usual.
Yes but at the same time, anyone attempting to set up legitimate crypto exchanges and engage in the kinds of shenanigans SBF indulged in will know to check with their lawyers before moving now, because they'll have to think "Will doing this (possibly fraudulent activity) land me in jail for 25 years like SBF?" - that's a decent deterrent.
I don’t know if I disagree, because I have not thought seriously about the risk/reward.
My point along with the grand parent is that at a certain point it is more costly than it is worth in deterrence. And the data backs that up, generally.
>5. There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals. According to the National Academy of Sciences, “Research on the deterrent effect of capital punishment is uninformative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates.”
Capital punishment is cheap though. And more humane than life sentence. Actually I think that we should return some form of corporal punishment and shorten prison sentences for non violent crimes. Subject SBF to Singapore style caning every month and 2-3 years in prison, forbid him to ever work with other people's money and be done with him.
What do you believe Sam would do if granted a shorter sentence, assuming they believe they've done nothing wrong? Who should carry the burden of re-offense without remorse?
People make mistakes, to err is human, and forgiveness should be provided to those with the capacity to change (ie harm less). Compassion is important. But if you don't believe you've done anything wrong, can we not project future potential outcomes? Prison duration is a risk assessment of harm reduction.
EDIT: Prison should still be about rehabilitation and treating humans humanely, to be clear.
> The difference is society gets 12 additional years of safety which it wouldn't get otherwise.
Naturally, by this logic I have to ask: why not 32 years? 52? 102? Aren't we doing society a disservice by ever allowing criminals to leave prison?
> Ostensibly
I chose this word carefully, because I think a lot of our preconceived notions on criminal behavior have not been validated by the real world, including the deterrent effects of long-term imprisonments.
> Naturally, by this logic I have to ask: why not 32 years? 52? 102?
Because the sentencing judge applied the guidelines provided by law as written by legislature, considered case-law, the specifics of this case and applied their professional judgement to come up with a 25-year sentence as an appropriate one for the crimes committed. If the defendant disagrees, they can appeal the sentence to get a second opinion.
You're attempting to reductio ad absurdum prison sentences - I'll apply it to your argument in turn - why send guilty people to prison at all? What's the difference between 1 day imprisonment and 60, or 6000? A sense of proportion is the difference between a black-and-white world and the one we strive for in reality.
> Because the sentencing judge applied the guidelines provided by law as written
We know the mechanics of why it was chosen. What I was asking was by your logic, 22 is less protective of society than 102, which makes me question the validity of "it protects society" reasoning. Why protect less when we have a quantifiably greater level of protection?
> You're attempting to reductio ad absurdum prison sentences
This is incredibly dismissive. We have arbitrary sentencing guidelines. They are based on reasoning, but that doesn't mean they are correct. They are fluid, change from locale to locale, and have unpredictable efficacy.
> why send people to prison at all? What's the difference between 1 day imprisonment and 60
You see, I don't think that's reductio ad absurdum at all. It's a valid question. You can argue for it and against it, but it isn't absurd or contradictory on its face.
> A sense of proportion is the difference between a black-and-white world
All you're saying here is 6000 > 1. We know this. I'm asking why 6000 is right, 1 is wrong, and why we throw away the other 5998.
> What I was asking was by your logic, 22 is less protective of society than 102, which makes me question the validity of "it protects society" reasoning
The answer to all variations of your underlying question in your post is because when handing down sentences, there are multiple, oft-conflicting considerations. We don't only consider societal safety - if we did we'd just jail everyone for life.
6000 is right because it is the right point of balance between keeping society safe and the rights of the imprisoned, while reflecting the seriousness of the crime without being cruel or unusual. Prison sentences inherently take away rights from the prisoner, and this is yet another thing that's thrown onto the pile of considerations for tradeoffs which individually lengthen or shorten the term of imprisonment. It's not a binary decision like you propose (imprisoned vs not imprisoned for any crime), but finding the right balance point (likely region or volume) on multidimensional axes.
I'm not a trial judge, but I can think of the following factors off thr top of my head: nature of crime committed, remorse, amount of harm, restitution (if any), sentencing guidelines in the law, probability of recidivism, safety of society, safety of defendant, sentences issued on similar cases in the past, appeals on similar cases in the past, prosecutor sentencing recommendations, defense sentencing recommendations, time already served, culpability, the number of charges defendant is found guilty of and whether they can be served simultaneously or not, etc. You're ignoring all of these and projecting the sentence to a single dimension (societal safety).
You haven't answered why you think we imprison people in the first place (or if we should). We cant have a fruitful discussion about which sentence durations are "better" without knowing what metrics we are measuring.
> We don't only consider societal safety - if we did we'd just jail everyone for life.
This is why I asked why 22 was right and 32 is wrong. "Because the judge said so" is no more useful than my asking "why heads?" and you answering "because that's where it landed when I flipped it."
There might not be a "right answer," and I'm ok with that. But it's odd to decide it's right simply because an authority decided it was.
> You're ignoring all of these and projecting the sentence to a single dimension (societal safety).
I'm not ignoring them, I'm simply responding to the reasoning you gave. By your metrics, 22 gives 12 more years of societal safety than does 10. This is what you responded to me, and I'm trying to point out that I believe it's flawed. If there are more factors included, it doesn't make this reasoning less flawed, it's just a smaller slice of the judgment's pie.
> You haven't answered why you think we imprison people in the first place (or if we should). We cant have a fruitful discussion about which sentence durations are "better" without knowing what metrics we are measuring.
Perhaps inadvertently, I think you hit the nail on the head. We don't have metrics that validate or invalidate any of this. We rely on a set of arbitrary guidelines mediated by emotions and feelings. In a great many cases, I don't think we're accomplishing anything but pushing a problem away and pretending we fixed it.
Forgive me for going meta: Your "Socratic method" falls short when you ignore obvious context. You assumed the liat of reasons I stated was exhaustive, I clarified in my reply that it wasn't and then after another back-and-forth you suggested I may have "inadvertently" stumbled upon the the real reason of your concerns: complexity, which I suppose you felt you were strongly hinting at, but I had explicitly mentioned earlier.
You will save yourself and others time by steelmanning and front-loading your priors - especially in written discussion forums like HN... Unless you're one of those people who enjoy debating more than learning other perspectives. This thread should not have been this deep when I have been stating "there are other factors" in my second contribution to it, and it turns out you were agreeing all along.
> You will save yourself and others time by steelmanning and front-loading your priors
This isn't what happened - my end of the conversation was a reaction to your replies and only your replies.
> This thread should not have been this deep when I have been stating "there are other factors" in my second contribution to it, and it turns out you were agreeing all along.
You did in the prior reply - at least explictly - only. Forgive me for not making assumptions of things you didn't say.
But again, my point was that if "protection of society" is a factor in this complex system, there's not much argument against maximizing that.
All that said ...
> complexity, which I suppose you felt you were strongly hinting at, but I had explicitly mentioned earlier.
This wasn't my conclusion, it was simply a reaction to getting more information in that reply than you had previously offered.
> Unless you're one of those people who enjoy debating more than learning other perspectives.
:(
Getting a reductive comment like this doesn't help.
> EDIT: Prison should still be about rehabilitation and treating humans humanely, to be clear.
No. Prison should be about punishment combined with rehabilitation, neither at the expense of the other.
It is perfectly OK to say that punishment, the infliction of pain, for a crime, is warranted even if it has no rehabilitative value, assuming that it is not demeaning or cruel.
Why? Several reasons:
1. Punishment has it's own value for the sake of justice. A hypothetical: Imagine there was a drug, with a 10% fatality rate, that perfectly rendered the receiver incapable of murder without any other side effects. They just perfectly gain control of their emotions and reason, or something to that effect. If a person goes and murders 50 individuals, but takes the drug and lives; they've been theoretically perfectly rehabilitated and need to be let back into society, right?
If you think, "of course not," you are now admitting that punishment has a value by itself.
EDIT: Also, this hypothetical, actually exists. Imagine this case with SBF. Imagine if the only penalty for his actions, were that he could not run a banking organization ever again, or hold more than $1,000,000 in any account that he controls. Perfectly rehabilitated, my hypothetical with the drug, in one swoop. He will never be able to commit this crime again.
I think I might very well run and do a financial fraud tomorrow. At least I'll enjoy the high life for several years. You are literally telling me, in that case, I could live for years, possibly decades (if I'm Madoff), and my only punishment will be that I can't do it again. After all, it's only about rehabilitation for myself; and to do otherwise would be punishment for punishment's sake.
2. If punishment is not given out fairly, and is only contingent upon rehabilitation; you are ignoring the rights and feelings of the victims and focusing too heavily on the rights and feelings of the criminal. Victims have feelings and rights, and considering they are the harmed, their feelings and rights ought to be first priority, and the criminal's second. Otherwise, victims feel the need to take things into their own hands. Always have, always will, as part of human nature. That's how you get societal meltdown, followed by vigilantism.
While there's some benefit (deterrence) to there being perceived costs to bad behaviour, it's arguable whether punishment for the sake of punishment stands up on its own merits.
In your proposed world, where murderousness is recognised as a treatable illness, it doesn't really seem reasonable to punish to punish or to imprison as a deterrent.
I'll kill your daughter, scatter her remains on the road, take the drug, and see if you think otherwise.
Think about it. Under this hypothetical (which I think is OK, everybody does Trolly Problems all the time), you should be just fine with this result. The deterrence value is there (10% chance of death), I've been rehabilitated permanently so I can be let out a week after I did the murder, it's all good. I might as well add some torture to the mix as well, because the drug will perfectly rehabilitate that too, of course, so it doesn't really matter how I did it either.
Some people are. Some people who have been victimized do forgive and ask for leniency.
There is an emotional and personal aspect to that, but typically we don't set laws that way.
I'd also argue that "it's all good" is not a fair measure for when we consider justice to be served. Practically, when there's nothing left to gain, the scale tips from justice to pure retribution.
> Some people are. Some people who have been victimized do forgive and ask for leniency.
I think you're confusing forgiveness with punishment. The two are not incompatible.
If your son hits your daughter, you forgive him immediately (you do not hold hatred or anger in your heart for that action); but you still punish him to deter the future behavior. The two are not incompatible, or at odds with one another. Similarly, it is not incompatible that a man who committed mass murder might be forgiven by the families (in that they won't hold hate in their hearts, or use his name as a curse), but the families may also simultaneously desire that the individual be removed from society.
> Practically, when there's nothing left to gain, the scale tips from justice to pure retribution.
Retribution is part of justice, and is not at odds with it. If I steal $500, I owe $500 as part of justice. If I steal $1,000; I owe $1,000 as part of justice. If I steal $10 billion dollars, a sum I shall never repay, I can only beg forgiveness and pay the most I reasonably can, for a reasonable amount of my life. For justice, at that point, recognizes that a society which allowed me to steal $10 billion in the first place, has some responsibility as well, reducing the required amount for retribution.
> I think you're confusing forgiveness with punishment. The two are not incompatible.
Not at all. You said "you should be fine with it," which is really "acceptance" rather than forgiveness, although they go hand in hand.
My point was simply that being fine with it or not being fine with it as an personal, emotional response typically does not guide modern societal rules.
> Retribution is part of justice, and is not at odds with it.
Inherently this is probably true, but we actually have laws that are intended to specifically exclude that as a factor, depending on jurisdiction.
The punishment so that the universe feels more fair to me isn't all that useful. Maybe as you suggest the mob lynchings in this case are unavoidable but I'm not convinced.
Happily (both for those who want to subjectively See Justice Done, and for those who upon reflection find it all a little perverse), the two don't really seem to be separable beyond a certain point.
It might work for you, but are you telling me that if you were the murderer in question, you wouldn't be afraid that the family wouldn't assassinate you at first opportunity if this happened to their daughter?
A heavy sentence is safety for the criminal as well.
That seems completely orthogonal to the point I disagreed with, which was (loosely, sorry) that punishment purely for punishment's sake is a social good.
I wonder how the measure they measure the deterrence effect, it seems impossible to me. It would be a society-wide thing (hard to come up with an isolated experiment) and it seems like something where people would bring in a ton of bias.
Recidivism I think is a great one: direct experience of the traumas of imprisonment not only fail to address the root failures which lead to crime, it seems to exacerbate it! If direct experience fails to deter, I am unconfident proxy experience would see success either. It's a meme by now, but see Norway for something closer to the mark.
Recidivism was something I wondered about for a second, but I think it is not what we’re looking for. I think the theory of deterrence is specifically that punishing crimes harshly will make other members of society less willing to commit crimes. Recidivism is a failure of rehabilitation, not deterrence, right?
It also seems like the population of ex-criminals couldn’t be representative of the population as a whole, right?
(FWIW I think the theory of deterrence is probably not correct, I can’t prove a negative, but the burden of proof lies at the feet of people who suggesting it I think).
> (FWIW I think the theory of deterrence is probably not correct, I can’t prove a negative, but the burden of proof lies at the feet of people who suggesting it I think).
There are absolutely times that I do not speed because I am concerned about the consequences of getting caught.
There are absolutely students in the school where I teach who follow given rules not because they agree with them, but because they are deterred by consequences. They refrain from climbing the volleyball net not from moral agreement, but because it will get them in trouble.
It's better for people to not commit crimes because they agree on the morals and principles involved... but if people don't agree or have a moment of weakness, the consequences are still influential.
These are just anecdotes, which are fine for informal conversations like this, but hopefully you’d be a little more rigorous if you were seriously proposing a course of action for the justice system.
In the case of students, they seem to try and cheat sometimes, so the deterrence doesn’t seem very effective. Anyway, the negative consequence is very disperse (it hurts the reputation of the school if they get through without learning anything). The main bad result falls on them (they waste thousands of dollars to intentionally avoid learning). They also might fail the final, not as a punishment, but as a natural result of not learning the material.
In the case of speeding, everyone here speeds. The flow of traffic is always 5-10 over the speed limit here. People are intentionally breaking the posted speed limit to go the safer speed (going the speed limit here impedes the flow of traffic and makes a more dangerous situation for everyone). I think it is more of an informal decision making process—people just follow the herd—but it is a funny example!
Are you saying you are never influenced by consequences in choosing what to do?
I understand the magnitude of deterrence effects may be in question, or that the relative worth of different types of deterrence are open to debate. But I don't really understand how something that is nearly a universal human experience can be in question. Almost everyone has chosen not to do something because of the consequences of outside rules.
Indeed, we can easily try and see. If I fail to be visible during break duty (so that students think there are unlikely to be consequences), students will climb the volleyball net. :D
> going the speed limit here impedes the flow of traffic and makes a more dangerous situation for everyone).
This has been studied and is itself a silly (untrue) anecdote.
> Are you saying you are never influenced by consequences in choosing what to do?
Nope.
> I understand the magnitude of deterrence effects may be in question, or that the relative worth of different types of deterrence are open to debate.
In the context of the thread
> A good prison system should balance all four.
I thought it would be clear that the magnitude and the relative worth were the topic. Sorry if that wasn’t the case! I’m definitely not going to defend the idea that nobody has ever avoided doing something for fear of punishment (although I do think that in a well functioning society, most of the negative consequences should be natural, not artificially imposed as punishments).
> If I fail to be visible during break duty (so that students think there are unlikely to be consequences), students will climb the volleyball net. :D
I think if that’s the sort of thing you are worried about, you must be working with kids. They probably need a stricter treatment, since their brains aren’t done yet.
Retribution shouldn't be the driving force, but I can understand it from a societal standpoint. Victims and the families of the victims will want to see a punishment applied for the harm they've suffered. It's in the state's interest to make sure that it's not excessively applied, but to degree there's a mix of correction and retribution that has to be taken into account at sentencing. One person's spite is another's justice.
I think that if too many people see retribution as no longer being applied, some people will start to take matters into their own hands to seek vengeance.
The state has an interest in preventing that and assuring retribution is applied as evenly as possible, and counterbalanced by other mitigating factors (e.g. the degree of offense, the circumstances under which it occurred, likelihood of reoffending, penitence of the guilty, etc.).
I find your points quite interesting. If I'm understanding correctly, that if the victims, families of victims, or frankly, anyone who feels pain and wants to seek retribution, don't believe that the retribution is sufficient, then they may take action into their own hands. I witnessed this living in Tanzania, where if people didn't trust the police to arrest and punish someone who stole, sometimes the people would track down and seek mob justice (violence?) against the person who stole.
So if the government would take a true rehabilitative approach, and maybe arrest people but treat them well, try to help them so they don't do the same behaviors in the future, a percentage of the population might see that as insufficient and take retribution into their own hands.
You've helped me realize why I've actually shifted my professional focus from wanting to change politics to wanting to change culture. Seems a lot of being in government is doing what the people want, and if the people want retribution, then the government has to follow it.
I hope for (and am working towards) a world in which we help people know our pain not by trying to cause the same pain to them, but by expressing our pain to them with more granularity, because the pain they'd feel as a result of retribution will never be the exact same pain we feel, as our contexts are way too complex to replicate exactly.
I really appreciate your comment, thank you for helping me think more deeply about this.
One of the most "unstabalizing" things in a society is a person or people with nothing to lose. You could make an argument for much of government being reducing the number of people with nothing to lose.
Yes, I think you've eloquently summarized my thinking on this. Thankfully I've never had to witness people trying to take justice into their own hands, as you have, though I imagine it must be harrowing to witness especially in a mob situation.
It sounds like you're trying to be part of the solution, which I deeply commend. Thank you also for your very thoughtful reply. It's appreciated.
I think both of those are flawed views. Not necessarily mistaken, but incomplete. One of the key reasons we imprison people is to prevent them from doing further harm to society: i.e., we put them in prison for our benefit, not theirs. It's definitely good if they're rehabilitated along the way, but rehabilitation isn't necessary for their imprisonment to be a net benefit to society.
What is a victimless crime? Speeding? Even though excessive speed is strongly correlated with crash deaths?
Fraud? The money comes from somewhere; someone is harmed by it (Pratchett's Going Postal has a good line on it - "No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”
I think it depends on how we define victim, and especially how direct and tangible the harm needs to be to be considered a victim.
But maybe it also has to do with whether people feel victimized. If no one felt victimized, would we punish?
So I imagine it's probably a combination of who feels victimized and who society believes should feel victimized. Because as others may respond, white-collar crime has people who get harmed as a result of the actions, even if it's not as obvious as the person directly punching them in the face.
One could argue that even the fact of breaking the law can harm those who went through great lengths to not break the law.
What SBF has done is not a victimless crime though: lots of fairly ordinary people lost money because of what he did, some of them lost everything.
Yes, I know some of the people who lost money are rich, and much is being made of that by people who want to troll by saying that's the only reason he really got into trouble (e.g., on Reddit). But that's not true: there are plenty of victims from SBFs crimes, both rich and not rich.
And in this kind of discussion I suggest it's helpful to avoid hypotheticals and to look at the real situations and outcomes relating to the case we're talking about.
I'll try to find the article, I think the point was that we think we are being violent to others with a conscious intention of trying to prevent future violence, but that most of the time we are doing it with the intention of them knowing our current pain that we think they caused to us, not really thinking much about the future.
So if the spite causes people to feel sufficiently afraid to do the action in the future, maybe it deters people from acting that way?
IMO an important component of punishment is convincing society that justice has been served. Too light a punishment, and vigilantism will become prevalent.
Your comment and another above has me thinking that it's almost like vicarious punishment. "If you don't punch them, I will, so you better punch them hard enough."
It makes sense. We empower the government to act on our behalf, including with violence. Arguably it is one of the fundamental reasons for government to exist.
And I wonder if certain calculations, like preventing vigilantism, tend to act on the behalf of not the majority of a population but an extreme few. Or in other words, if 95% of the population support an idea but 5% violently opposes it, does the government cater more to the 95% or 5%? At what point are government officials afraid that the 5% will commit violent acts against society or them and their loved ones and therefore cater to their perspective more than the majority?
My perception of some of these financial crimes - Madoff included - is they start off with a small slip, rather than a full dive into fraud. A lot of times it snowballs while the person responsible keeps searching for a way out.
I wonder at what point SBF would have even said what he was doing was immoral. If you're running a Ponzi scheme you think you can salvage, would you compare yourself to Madoff, or would you think "I'm trying to set things right"?
From what I read on Wikipedia, Madoff didn't make a single investment with the money given to his wealth management program. He deposited it all into a bank account and paid people out of the same bank account. This is notably different from SBF's case.
Rather, I'm suggesting that in the eye of the beholder, a very clear case of fraud might be self-perceived as a bump on the road to lawful, legitimate financial dealings.
So the question is if SBF didn't see himself as committing the same crimes as Madoff (even if he was), would Madoff's sentencing and fate even register as a potential deterrent?
We don't know to what extent prison is a deterrent. It's classic survivor bias - we only get to see the cases where the deterrent failed, not where it succeeded.
I've always been in favor of the Norway sentencing model [0]. 21 years is the max prison sentence, with 5 year extensions possible. Punishment must always carry the possibility of rehabilitation and return to society, even in the most extreme cases. A small amount of people will show no remorse or willingness to improve and will remain in prison for life.
I think that might be the best normal path, but I think there's a (relatively small) population of offenders who we can know have no real prospect of rehabilitation.
Perhaps the more important distinction: if we're going to let people out of prison eventually, we should make sure that prison is a place that is set up in the best way to make that eventual return to society successful. Right now, it feels like we do the opposite.
Ouch! I hadn't heard of this before, and I gotta say I'm not a fan.
I agree with it only in principle; it seems ripe for injustice in all practical details.
If you maintain your innocence, is that a lack of remorse? Can you be any kind of 'model citizen' in prison - engaging in charity or volunteer work? Who brings the +5 year charge or provides evidence for it? The prison staff who don't find your personable, or the shrink who doesn't think you're taking the sessions seriously (if shrink visits in prison exist)?
> I agree with it only in principle; it seems ripe for injustice in all practical details.
Yep, instead of "you definitely get out of prison after X years have passed" you instead get "you get out of prison in 21 years! (or never, depending on how we feel)".
Per the wiki page, the five year extensions are for the indeterminate penalty, not for any prison sentence. The alternate to this sentence is "We will kill you in prison" or "You will die in prison".
Imo 5 means 3 and that is too low for most serious crimes, it feels almost like an incentive to just not get caught, more than an incentive to not do it all.
Losing 20 years of your life though will have a drastic effect on the rest of your life. As it should for some crimes.
Or is your argument we should skip from 10 to death, I'm honestly not sure.
I guess the nuance is that SBF can get paroles if he behaved well. That is, this 25 years can be punitive, but he will also has a chance to earn some trust and reduce the punishment.
There is a possible "good behavior" reduction, but the maximum of that works out to around 15% off the sentence. He'll serve at least 21 of those years or so.
He can’t get parole, but can get RDAP, halfway house, first step act, good behavior (15%), in theory a rule 35b (not sure what he knows), and whatever else gets invented in the future. Maybe a commuted sentence but probably not for a while.
Probably out in 17 years which is still a long time.
I was most surprised by the recommendation of medium security. Not sure how well Sam will do in a medium.
The problem is, criminals think they will not be caught. There is a deterrent, but the difference between 10, 20 and 30 years is abstract for someone who thinks they are not caught.
At some point its not about deterrent or social benefit but justice. People can say its not fair or productive for people like him to be locked up forever. Well, what about their victims? How many people's financial futures were destroyed by SBF? Is it fair to all those people that he will get to live a normal life? And likely a comfortable well off one at that. He already had a privileged family and I have no doubt it will be easy for him to profit off his story once he gets out. The hardly seems right.
It protects potential future victims - both from SBF and from those who might want to emulate him.
Which is why I think the sentence is too low.
There are other ways he could make reparations. One would be to have one-to-one meetings with his victims, where they tell him in person how his actions affected them.
There's a fair chance it would bounce right off SBF, because he clearly has serious personality issues.
> Well, what about their victims? How many people's financial futures were destroyed by SBF? Is it fair to all those people that he will get to live a normal life?
That sounds more like retribution than justice. I.E. wanting to cause him pain because he caused pain in others.
Of course, i don't have a better answer by any means.
It is deterrence: it sends the message of don't do the same thing or you'll wind up in prison for a long time. It really isn't retribution, this kind of enforcement is meant to scare other potential white collar criminals into not breaking the law as well.
So, legal theory provides three reasons for punishment:
1) revenge ("an eye for an eye") - that's not considered a factor anymore today except as an upside-limit on the punishment, ie, the punishment should not exceed the damage caused. Here, the damage caused was immense, so don't think that'll be a limiting factor.
2) specific prevention - keep that particular perpetrator off the streets, so they can't commit crimes again. There's some argument that old people commit fewer crimes, so when the perpetrator is old enough, one can let them go. Maybe one shouldn't let SBF out until he's older than Madoff was...
3) general prevention, aka deterrence - make sure that the punishment (in conjunction with the probability of being caught) is sufficient to discourage others from committing the crime. This is problematic as apparently most perpetrators seem to think that they won't be caught (which is why capital punishment doesn't necessarily reduce crime rates). I think in this case it's good that the many, many crypto "operators" see that there is some downside in scamming people.
In this case, could he be considered a violent economic threat to society? His defense did try to argue that he was not a "ruthless financial serial killer".
Definitions vary depending on context. I think of violence as a spectrum. Talking peacefully and negotiating is extremely low violence. Threats etc are more. All our war and atomics are about the limit.
> Some definitions are somewhat broader, such as the World Health Organization's definition of violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation."
Violence IMO is anything which causes harm or can be used to force a condition.
No, screaming at someone is not violence. The WHO definition you cite also restricts its definition to physical force. If screaming were violence, we'd have prisons full of sports fans after every football game.
"Harming someone" is anything which causes harm. We have different words to describe different things. In this way, we can tell them apart when communicating with each other.
Not all violence is wrong or illegal, and not all screaming is violence.
Words are defined by people. By seeing violence as a spectrum you can see the spectrum of possible responses to violence. We can then distinguish the different forms of violence with other words, like "physical"
At least if you are making statements going against the general understanding of the society you're in then make a reference to the ideas or theories that prompt you to make these statements.
Note: many forms of theft obviously involve violence.
Most deep discussions require some amount of discussing your terms. A surprising amount of insight can be gathered by playing with and altering previous assumptions of a word's meaning.
For instance, by seeing violence as a spectrum you can see that while lying to the Nazi about the Jewish person in your attic is "committing violence" against said Nazi, you can also recognize that the lie is quite obviously justified violence -- and there is a spectrum of justified violence in that case.
When you lie to someone you damage their ability to see reality as it is, especially the reality of yourself (your thoughts, motivations, etc). Its not as severe as a punch to the face (in most cases at least) but it still causes harm.
The main purpose of imprisoning white-collar crime is to act as a deterrent. If the upside for a financial crime is billions of dollars, and the potential risk is 25 years in prison, lots of people will be willing to take that risk, especially if 25 years actually means 17ish with good behavior.
If the punishment is life in prison with no chance of parole, it'll act as more of a deterrent.
Punishment lengths don't act as a deterrent to petty and violent crime, because the people commiting those crimes are not intelligent or are crimes of passion. Systematic fraud like this is slow, calculated and methodical.
Feels low to me too. I think the distinction between "violent" is completely irrelevant. I think taking money from people does just as much harm as physically injuring them -- many people would rather have several bones broken than lose their pension.
The benefit is the deterrent. It's especially important for wealthy people who we may wonder if they greased wheels behind the scenes.
If you want somebody to cry about, cry about a man doing a life sentence for marijuana possession, not sbf. [1]
FWIW people have a viceral reaction to extremes of violence that they can comprehend.
When you consider that a 1% unemployment rate increase generally correlates to ~5,000 deaths then you can consider gross financial negligence to have an actual tangible human mortality cost.
We just don't, because it's too indirect and your laywer would argue confounding factors until you are all dead; but don't be mistaken: financial crimes do cost lives.
"But financial cons are VICTIMLESS CRIMES! Give the guy a slap on the wrist and let him clean someone else's life's savings again! They may or may not kill themselves. VICTIMLESS!"
> If someone isn't a violent threat to society, there isn't much social benefit to keeping folks locked up longer then 20-ish years.
This unfortunately widely held belief is measurably wrong and reeks of all kinds of biases. White collar criminals are one of the categories most likely to reoffend. Recidivism is much higher in white collar criminals precisely due to the leniency they often experience and the powerful financial motives associated with these types of crimes.
For violent crime 38.9% of convicts were arrested for new crime within 3 years of release. White collar crime on the other hand had a 58.8% 3-year recidivism rate.
White collar crime poses systemic risks which violent crime doesn't to the same extent. It undermines confidence in institutions by creating corruption and waste, enriching few at the expense of many. When it becomes normalized and widespread this kind of crime can destroy a country's economic and political systems.
> In analyzing recidivism of violent criminals, the
criteria used were any prisoner with two or fewer prior arrests, who
had been convicted of rape, homicide, assault, other sexual abuse, or
other violent crime.
> In examining at white collar criminals, the criteria used were any
prisoner with two or fewer prior arrests, who had been convicted of
larceny, theft, motor vehicle theft, or other property crime (which
included types of fraud, embezzlement, etc.).
I wonder if you removed the "two or fewer" if you'd get a different result.
I very much agree with your last paragraph. I would go so far as to say that white collar crime is worse than violent crimes because it is the pernicious ability of white collar crime to perpetuate the environment that it flourishes that can lead to the social decay that you're talking about which ultimately causes violent crime.
Another aspect of white collar crime vs violent crime is that there's no real legal concept of self defense against white collar criminals while in most places there's varying degrees of force you can use in response to a violent crime being committed against you or a stranger. With white collar crime a psychopath wearing a corporation can act with impunity and ruin your livelihood in all kinds of ways and there's nothing you can do about it.
It is ridiculous that finance owns such an outsized position in our economy, with the wizards of finance hailed for their key role in the efficient performance of the economy rewarded to the tune of megabillionaires...
and people will say with a straight face that defrauding large numbers of people of their money might not have numerous health / fatal consequences: anxiety, stress, divorce, loss of benefits, working longer past retirement.
It's like saying Mafia bosses or Hitler or Stalin weren't violent and dangerous because they ordered the deaths of millions with a stroke of a pen.
Maybe don't send your money to an unregulated startup in the Bahamas to gamble on cryptocurrencies if losing that money is going to cause you to commit suicide?
The "victims" knew they were intentionally avoiding government oversight of securities law, banking regulators, etc. When they lost money we should have collectively shrugged our shoulders and said that's the risk they chose to take.
Maybe that girl shouldn't have worn that skirt, maybe that black guy shouldn't have been in that town after sunset, maybe that guy shouldn't have had a boyfriend.
There was a trial and now a sentencing, your argument according to law is wrong.
It sounds callous, but if accept the suggestion that he's responsible for their deaths, how can we then excuse people working in the casinos or other gambling ventures that surely lead to the deaths of many.
Or would folks here suggest the numerous HN contributors who have worked in gambling tech are deserving of life in prison as well?
Gambling, like finance, has rules. If I start a casino, and tell everyone that the roulette is fair, and then go ahead and rig it so no one ever wins, then yea, I should be sent straight to prison.
If SBF told everyone loud and clear "hey guys you can give me money and I will use it to gamble on my favorite crypto tokens and play board games with Caroline" then I don't think he would deserve a prison sentence (but he also wouldn't get any customers). It's the deception that makes it a crime.
For me, SBF's fraud is a comorbidity but not likely the underlying cause of the suicides. By similar logic, should we imprison all tobacco executives?
Personally, I'm glad SBF is being held accountable but this sentence seems very harsh, especially given that I expect all of his coconspirators will mostly be let off the hook.
Yes. He's been made an example of. That's kind of the point: "Tempted to commit fraud on a huge scale and wreck thousands of lives? Consider what we did to this guy."
On a much more severe scale, this is clearly the message that the Kremlin lavishly displayed of the initial treatment of the suspects involved in the Moscow Crocus Hall shootings/bombing - the results of severe torture send an unmistakable message of "Do not be tempted to try this (terrorism/attempted revolution" to the citizenry, with the implicit message that their very-short remaining lifespan will be very painful.
"Do not be tempted to try this (terrorism/attempted revolution" to the citizenry
And the citizenry are the only ones left who can be deterred by this message. Islamic State will switch to using suicide bombers who have no fear of torture.
My personal theory is that Prigozhin's aborted mutiny last year and Ukraine's sustained drone campaign against Russian oil infrastructure paved the way to the Crocus Hall attack. Now the doors have been opened and Russia's internal security has been revealed for the paper tiger that it is. Every single paramilitary group with a bone to pick with Russia has now been forcefully made aware of Putin's weakness and now they'll be lining up to copy these attacks. All the while, he continues to try to blame Ukraine for this despite all evidence to the contrary. Scary times to be living in Russia right now!
> A sentence of 25 years completely destroys his life.
No, it does not "destroy his life". He will be in his early/mid-50's when gets out. Someone with his privilege, education and resources should have known better. It's hard to feel sympathy. I expect that sufficient punishment in cases like this will serve as a deterrent for others like SBF who would do the same.
Hopefully he is ALSO restricted, for life, from ever working in finance again.
>Hopefully he is ALSO restricted, for life, from ever working in finance again.
A felony conviction is pretty effective for heavily restricting any type of employment. The universal and cheap access to background checks means work is either places that deliberately have "hire a felon" programs or some type of self-employment, or connections with people very high up in a company. Though all those angles are also complicated if any sort of state licensing is involved.
That doesn't actually seem to be the case for white collar criminals though. That guy from Wolf of Wall street is conning people to this very day, including being a hype guy for crypto scams!
I don't know for sure, but "hype guy" probably means self-employed and companies pay his company for that sort of thing. That is available for blue-collar felons also.
As far as I am concerned, when you steal from me, you robbed me of piece of my life. The time I spend earning that money, instead of being with friends or just pursuing a hobby or just wasting it on HN.
How many lifetimes worth of time were destroyed by his fraud.
I mean... At the end of the day everyone 'invested' their money here. The risks of high interest Bitcoin accounts were well known and elucidated by all reputable sources. If you lost money in this, I'm truly sorry, but realistically what did you expect. It wasn't even a bank (and remember if your bank loses money, no one's going to jail as long as they followed regulations).
Madoff spent ~12 years in prison before he died at 82.
They gave him a 150 year sentence for a crime on par-ish with SBF's crimes, because at 70 there is little difference between 20 years and 100 years, so you may as well go for the shock value.
I don't think we should pressure people into admitting guilt, but cooperating could be important. What more should he have done to help the people affected by his fraud?
I agree we should not pressure it but if you are guilty and caught with your hand in the cookie jar, it could be your best option. A good attorney will advise you if your best course is to minimize the damage by accepting a plea deal.
I think it seems low because of the magnitude of the crime. Also because we punish more violent crimes with very harsh sentences including charging non-violent perpetrators with violent crimes(Felony Murder).
Add in the desire to be seen as doing something with sentencing inflation and your get multiple hundred year sentences.
At first I felt that 25 years was short but thinking about it, he will be ~60 when he gets out... so maybe not too short.
I don't know. The appropriateness of the sentence is not something I feel super strongly about one way or the other, but 25 years is objectively a very long time. Think about what a typical person does in their first 25 years. That's long enough for a person to be born, go through early childhood, go through all of their basic schooling, attend college, get a job and work for 5 years, and have a kid of their own. Or, think about a 25 year old person, and put them next to a 50 year old person. Or a 50 year old person next to a 75 year old person. It's just a very long amount of time, no matter how you slice it.
Best teacher I had in high school taught economics. First day of class his lesson was "If you're going to become a criminal follow these 10 rules".
I can't remember all the rules but the two I do:
1. Don't do anything for less than $1M. Risk isn't worth the reward.
2. Don't use a weapon. It adds years to your sentence.
It was mostly about how white-collar crime has a much safer risk/reward ratio.
How you commit crime is make it complicated enough that a prosecutor will think twice about their ability to teach a jury about how what you did worked and that any of the steps were even wrong in the first place. This is why so much financial crime goes unpunished.
He was playing fast and loose with clients' money (and ultimately made profitable investments). Elizabeth Holmes played fast and loose with medical testing and people's very lives. She got less than half this sentence.
I think intent matters. I don't like what he did but I am convinced he didn't think he was doing something deceitful. Whereas Madoff had a guilty conscience and precisely crafted something intended to deceive.
SBF is 32 years old. If (and it's a big if) he serves the entire 25 years, he will be 57 when he is free again. They are taking the best years of his life, and one day when he dies, having been imprisoned will be the defining event of his life - not being rich or being a CEO.
He may never marry, never have children, and will experience a very different (and far worse) life than most of the population. I have very little sympathy for the man, and I know draconian punishment is fashionable and cathartic, but I personally think this is a very suitable punishment for the very severe crime he committed.
Why, as a matter of interest? These _really_ big, blatant frauds usually do; see Madoff, Holmes, et al. Like, it's hard to see how he'd avoid prison, certainly in the US.
Other noted fraud-y bitcoin exchange guy Mark Karpelès avoided prison after conviction, but the evidence was much weaker there and they only found him guilty on fraudulently inflating MtGox's holdings (a la Donald Trump); also, that was Japan.
(Fun fact; after the collapse of MtGox, Karpelès went into business with Andrew Lee, the guy who broke freenode and claims to be the Crown Prince of Korea. The world of weird internet grifters is small and incestuous.)
He was well connected, especially his parents. Huge political donor. He likely would have recieved a small sentence and somewhat validated my doubt had he not purgured and witness tampered during the trial.
Sure, but, like, so were Madoff and Holmes. Henry Kissinger, _Henry Kissinger_, was on Theranos's board. Rupert Murdoch invested. I don't think SBF really had anyone on that level?
There is a certain point where it no longer matters; such connections would only really matter if they could get the investigation stopped. Once it goes to court, assuming it's a proper court, those sort of connections kind of cease to matter.
Yeah, it's been a bit funny to watch the goalposts move. He won't be arrested, he won't be charged, he won't go to trial, he won't be convicted, he'll get a light sentence, his political donations will get him off, etc.
One person was cynical. Everyone else chimed in to correct that person: SBF was "new money" which carries no social status to protect against jail time.
There were dozens if not hundreds of SBF threads; the above link is just one subthread of one of those threads. In each of them, quite a few people would argue he'd never see consequences; his political donations were extensively pointed to as evidence of this.
The top voted comment in that topic is saying he's going to jail. Just because in a forum with a gazillion people some people have a different one doesn't make it representative of the median/mean/etc.
Also, it's not bad to have a counter-opinion to a group; it is bad to claim a singular opinion is that of the group without any actual justification.
The top voted comment in that topic is also saying "For everyone on this thread making broad proclamations about how SBF won't go to jail", yes? Implying quite a few people held that opinion here?
Sure, at least a few people held that opinion. However, that isn't what the post I'm replying to said.
The post I replied to used the literally lowest voted top level comment as their basis of "HN didnt think he was going to jail". They skipped over all of the higher top level comments when making their post (you have to go to the bottom of page 2 to see the one they picked).
Their post is classic bad faith argument and I think it should receive a penalty (downvote).
It is absolutely worth remembering that much of the commentary on this site is written by some of the most gullible people on the planet. Aside from SBF-Biden conspiracy fans you also have your anti-vax guys, your climate denial guys, suckers for the latest superconductor scam, people who are still falling for a giant astroturf campaign by the fission industry, blockchain believers, and much much more.
The point is not that people were wrong but they were wrong because they had knee-jerk, lazy takes that should be disparaged.
I also know that the some of the people making these kind of takes have already pivoted to another knee-jerk, lazy take along the lines of "well, he ripped off rich people".
I'd actually appreciate it if anybody who made the original statements about Democrats not prosecuting SBF would come on and admit they were wrong.
A lot of people confuse cynicism with wisdom, and that sets people up to be susceptible to bigger problems. For example, if you believe the legal system is corrupt and dysfunctional, it’s very easy to passively tune out and not support reform efforts because you think they’re pointless.
We see this a lot in politics where accusations of corruption are used to conflate people who are orders of magnitude apart – a good example of that are the recent classified documents investigations where some faux-sophisticates tried the “both sides do it!” excuse without recognizing the difference between immediate compliance and protracted resistance on contrived grounds.
People also commit suicide if the bank repossesses their home, their spouse has an affair, their surgeon makes an error, etc.
I’m not saying that SBF has no culpability, but I don’t think you should get prison time for causing someone’s suicide, or at least society doesn’t act as if it’s in any way equivalent to murder.
The scale of SBF's fraud was so enormous that the money could have been used to save hundreds of lives that have now perished. So if we use a little bit of EA napkin math, we can conclude SBF's crimes were on par to hundreds of murders.
The victims are going to get paid back (in 2022 crypto prices) due to the appreciation of FTX’s assets (crypto and Anthropic shares). So if someone lost a bitcoin when FTX collapsed (BTC was at $18k at the time) they will get more than $18k but not $70k which is today’s price.
If you wanted those kinds of banking protections, then you should have used a currency system that has those protections. Bitcoin is "easy" because it is unregulated, but the flip side of that is that you the consumer get no protection, and you shouldn't expect any.
This is pretty twisted. FTX can claim it made customers whole by benefiting from exactly the speculative gains that it prevented its customers from getting.
It’s certainly immoral but it’s the risk you take investing in an unregulated market. There are regulations to prevent exactly this when you invest in stocks or put your US dollars into a bank account.
That has zero to do with SBF's intention and should not be in any way a defense against the wrong perpetrated against them.
It could easily have crashed.
That it went in a direction that helps make his victims more whole is entirely happenstance and SBF should get ZERO credit or recognition for this aspect of restitution.
Also of note is since this is a federal conviction there is no parole in that system, and so unless SBF is successful in his appeal, he will spend at least 255 months in prison, that’s a 15% reduction versus the total sentence in return for good behavior while serving his sentence.
High, generally. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and US sentences are an outlier in terms of how long they are (they’re not the longest, but the whole picture is kind of shocking).
I get your point, the claim was incorrect. But if you're only beaten by Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and American Samoa... Well, maybe the overall point stands: "Highest in the world" is hyperbole, that much is true, but the USA has an insanely high rate of incarceration, higher than most countries, and definitely higher than all "developed" countries. As a point of comparison, the next OECD member on that list is Turkey, which has about 34% fewer prisoners per 100k people than the USA.
Assuming the accuracy of that source on the numbers, its actually the 5th.
Yes, the United States is the sixth listed, but the 5th listed is part of the United States, not a separate country. (So are several others, but I don't think Guam or the US Virgin Islands are big enough that they move the US overall rating down far enough to matter.)
A difference in philosophy on prison sentence length. The higher incarceration rate is almost 100% explained by sentences that are on average roughly twice what the UK imposes (as one example).
They've never made any sense to me, but neither do my country's sentence lengths. Ours seem too light, whereas the US's seem extreme.
I guess I'm really not sure what value there is to locking up someone like this for 25 years when in a sane system/society there should be far better options.
Quite a short sentence for the magnitude of the crime. Financial crimes like these do kill people and destroy countless lives. They deserve maximum pentalties.
That is a big difference. You can live a pretty good 15 or so years if you get out at 60. Considering that his parents are well off he will inherit some.
I think its probably taking the approximately 21 years you get with the sentence with maximum good conduct time reduction, and also assuming credit for time served after his bail was revoked.
This is not correct. Federal sentences do not have parole and can be reduced by a maximum of only 15%, meaning (if that happens) SBF will serve at least 21 years and be 53 when released.
Milken was released because Trump pardoned him, which I don't think says anything about how sentencing guidelines do or should work.
He was released after a sentence reduction for cooperation with prosecutors against others decades before the pardon. Both the release and pardon occurred, but the latter was not the reason for the former.
Milken got a sentence reduction for cooperation with prosecutors against others. The other big fish in FTX already cooperated against SBF, who do you expect him to roll over on?
If it is to harm him and make the rest of the world satisfied with it 25 years behind bars seems enough to me, I don’t care if it is 25, 35 or 155. In five years I will have forgotten about this.
If it is stopping others, same thing, I don’t think that if someone is determined to do something similar would care about 25 or more years.
It will also give the enablers of criminality pause. If the mastermind gets 20-25, they'll realize they are risking 2-5 year sentences with zero upside just for "following orders" or negligently turning a blind eye to malfeasance.
Just a quick reminder to any potential felons in finance/crypto/corporate settings. If you decide to rob billions from the public, we'll let you out in about a decade as long as you don't beat someone up in prison. Just make sure you hide your money well!
I think of it like this: Many people would "happily" spend 5 years in prison for a more than probable chance to get filthy rich. That's a superset with, I imagine, significantly greater cardinality than the set of those willing to spend 25.
Obviously there is a sweet spot. For example, if you're okay with 60 years, than you're probably okay with 80. I'd imagine 20, give or take 5 years or so, is near that sweet spot, but that's just my gut feeling. Obviously statistics is key here, if there is any.
How long do you think it takes to rehabilitate someone so disconnected from reality and empathy as SBF?
Honestly I think that would take LONGER than 50 years...
I think 25 is on the high end of a reasonable sentence. White collar crime in the US has been a slap on the wrist (if anything!) since Enron. It's time we fix that. People need to see personal consequences for such anti-social and destructive behavior. If you are a CEO, you should be afraid of profiting from the suffering of others.
> prison should fundamentally be abt rehabilitation
You can’t ignore retribution and incapacitation. Focus solely on rehabilitation and people will take the law into their own hands while raging against the system when it comes to recividism.
We need to focus more on rehabilitation and restoration. But those can’t be exclusive of the other components of justice.
He will have to serve 21 years before early release. There is no parole in federal prison. I heard 5 years are concurrent making it 20 actual years. If that’s the case he can get out in 17 years.
Nope, it's Federal. He has appeals coming up though. I have no idea what the outcome could be but there's an opportunity for the sentence to be reduced on appeal. Honestly, this sentence doesn't appear egregious or "being made an example of" so IMO he doesn't get a reduction. But, sometimes you get a sympathetic judge?
Its a federal case tried by the US Attorney’s office for, and in the US District Court for, the Southern District of New York.
Media will sometimes (because this are in Manhattan) label these as a Manhattan/New York prosecutors or a Manhattan court, but it is federal, not state, prosecutors and court in New York, not New York prosecutors or court.
If he’s eligible for parole at 1/3 of a 25 year sentence, he will spend anywhere from between 8 years, 4 months in prison or 25 years. That would make him somewhere between 40 and 57 when he gets out.
That's from 1984, federal parole was abolished in 1987 (though people sentenced before 1987, IIRC, remain eligible according to the rules in place at the time.)
SBF was sentenced somewhat after 1987, so those rules don't apply to him.
This is a federal sentence, so there is no parole. The most time off you can get in the federal system for good behavior is 54 days per year of sentence, so less than 4 years off for SBF's 25-year sentence.
> If he’s eligible for parole at 1/3 of a 25 year sentence
He is not; there is no federal parole (for people sentenced ib the last ~37 years.) There is “good conduct time” that can reduce time served to not less than ~85% of the time sentenced, so around 21 years minimum.
Well, its a little more complicated, and depending on the degree of release you are interested in. He could be “out” either a year earlier than I said in the above, or in half of his total sentence:
For those wondering, prosecutors asked for 50 years in prison, defense asked for 5 years. So this sentence is right down the middle. 50 years in prison would have been way too long IMO.
No, he can be released after 12.5 years due to time credits for good behavior. Time credits used to be capped at 15% of the sentence, but due to the relatively recent "First Step" Act it's now 50%.
You should use a geometric mean for this sort of stuff. The difference between a one- and two-year sentence is much bigger than 25 and 26.
So that would be 16 years, though obviously, it's foolish to use "right down the middle" as a heuristic for something like this. (The more severe a crime, the more incentive the defense has to pretend like it didn't happen at all.)
I found it a lot easier to understand the harmonic and geometric averages when I learned about the "generalized f-mean". Many averages are arithmetic averages of a transformation of the value. "f" refers to the function which transforms your values. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-arithmetic_mean
- The geometric average is the arithmetic average of the logarithm. It places emphasis on the ratio between numbers, rather than the absolute difference.
- The harmonic average is the arithmetic average of the multiplicative inverse. It averages values by a constant numerator rather than denominator. For example, the average fuel economy of multiple vehicles makes more sense per-distance, so miles/gallon should be rewritten as gallons/mile.
- The (RMS) root-mean-square is the arithmetic average of the square. Electrical power is proportional to the square of the amperage or voltage, so AC current and voltage uses the RMS average to make the power calculations correct.
25 years is a long, long time. He's going to spend the best years of his life in federal prison and come out the other side in a world that's moved on without him. 25 years ago the World Trade Center buildings were still standing.
IMO, if we're thinking of sentencing someone to 50 years or life in prison, we should cut to the chase and execute them instead. It's faster and cheaper for the taxpayers, and arguably less cruel.
we don't execute for financial fraud and white collar crimes. I do think prisoners should be given an option for assisted suicide in cases where they get 50+ year sentences, however. Obviously there would be more complexities to that like wait times and mental evaluations.
Unless he dies, gets a pardon, commutation, or sentence reduction first, the minimum he can serve under existing law is ~21 years based on a 25 year sentence and maximum good conduct time.
You're usually a very accurate poster on legal matters, but this contradicts the linked article:
SBF may serve as little as 12.5 years, if he gets all of the jailhouse credit available to him," Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor, told CNN.
Federal prisoners generally can earn up to 54 days of time credit a year for good behavior, which could result in an approximately 15% reduction.
Since 2018, however, nonviolent federal inmates can reduce their sentence by as much as 50% under prison reform legislation known as the First Step Act.
Are you saying the article is wrong, or did you maybe not consider this possibility?
So, yes, I forgot to account for FSA earned time, of which up to 12 months can be applied to early supervised release (essentially, parole, though its not called that) and the remainder for pre-release custody (home confinement or residential re-entry center insteas of prison.) so, by completing the right activities, SBF could be on a parole-like status in ~20 instead of ~21 years, and in custody but not in actual prison in ~12.5 years.
That's not an automatic reduction (or even as close to it as good conduct time), as it requires successful participation in specified activities, but it is generally available except for a defined list of mostly violent offenses.
and a million others correcting the "85%" meme that HN parrots incessantly (not sure why anyone would expect programmers to be experts on federal incarceration nuances)
I think like all these white collar crime cases it's as much about emotion and appearance as actual damage. SBF wasn't a career criminal with multiple past grifts, and he didn't have any violent acts associated with the grift. So he got a lighter sentence. If he had been a part of a crime family, it would have been much longer. I'm not sure that the prosecutors are allowed to bring in tangential loss of life like multiple suicides (bankruptcy, financial destruction) that were no doubt triggered by SBF's efforts to defraud people.
Wait...why did a public pension fund invest in crypto-related <something>?
(I still don't know what FTXes product was, but clearly it wasn't bare BTC or ETH, implying it was a risky derivative of a risky underlying asset).
FTX was just an exchange. If you invest money into Bitcoin, you will have to do it on some (centralized or decentralized) exchange. You'd expect that FTX would keep your Bitcoins safe in a digital vault somewhere, but SBF did not and instead used customer assets to gamble with Alameda Research.
There are totally good reasons for a pension fund to invest minority assets into BTC, mostly diversification (check out Modern Portfolio Theory [1]). You may calculate the risk that BTC goes up or down, but most people probably didn't expect the exchange to lose the money.
It's not the first time it happened (see Mt Gox), but FTX prided itself on being the most risk-averse. Yet it turned out all of that was based on fraud and fake numbers, fraudulent enough to even fool pension funds.
Btw is that money irretrievably gone? Are those people getting their money back based on the recovered price of crypto? Or did those assets get liquidated long ago into actualized losses?
His cellmate, ex president of Honduras got 40 mandatory years.
I think 25 years is not enough for such a massive crime.
>>On 8 March 2024, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy and faces mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in prison.
I feel like going right down the middle between what the prosecution wants (50 years) and what the defense wants (put the king's robes and crown on him, then parade him on the king's horse in the city square and announce before him, 'So shall be done to the man whom the king wishes to honor!') is maybe not the right way to pick.
Considering the multitude of charges, this is actually pretty low. It appears he was sentenced to a less-than-full term for each of the charges, to be served sequentially (since if the sentences were served simultaneously, the total actual term would be much less than 25 years).
We'll know more in about an hour.
EDIT: Actually, the Verge has already reported:"The judge applied a 240-month sentence and a 60-month sentence to be served consecutively."
I am puzzled by the concept of simultaneous sentences. Is "simultaneous" just a complicated way of saying "you get the max of the two numbers"? Because it's not like you're in a prison cell inside another prison cell. If I'm carrying 2 suitcases simultaneously, that's harder than carrying one at a time. But 2 prison sentences simultaneously is not harder than one sentence.
Is it possible he gets a pardon from Biden? Apparently Ross Ulbrecht who is arguably much more serious crime, was close to getting a pardon from Trump (he seriously discusses it with his advisors at least and expressed sympathy)
I think that's about fair and reasonable. It's been said in Europe he would not have gotten more than years and it's probably true. 25 years is a really long time and even if he does only 20, still super long.
Here's a live tweeting of the sentencing hearing; some of Judge Kaplan's remarks are really interesting.
Tbh, a bunch of American (high profile) lawyers had estimated that he'd only get a couple of years, max, as he had no prior convictions - and the nature of the case.
I think they must be unfamiliar with the federal judicial system which is almost always on the conservative side of sentencing unless there were some extremely extenuating circumstances. There were none here, this was straight up greed and grift on Sam's part.
If I broke into a person's house and stole $1000, even if I didn't directly hurt that person, I could expect to get several years in prison, basically regardless of the state. Lets say three years to be conservative on this?
Sam Bankman Fried stole billions of dollars [1], probably often around $1000 at a time from tens of thousands of people. If going with my logic, he should be getting a lot longer than 25 years, upwards of hundreds or thousands of years. Obviously, it's not a linear relationship, the crime was non-violent, first-time-offender, etc. I'm just saying that 25 years seems pretty fair to me considering the magnitude of the crime.
I am one of the victims (well, of Gemini Earn anyway), and I think if I were given the choice, I'd probably sentence him to 20-25 years.
[1] Or at least so grossly mismanaged that there's no real purpose in drawing a distinction.
> If I broke into a person's house and stole $1000, even if I didn't directly hurt that person, I could expect to get several years in prison
Almost definitely not, especially if it was your first crime. It’s pretty unlikely you’d even be caught.
Severity of the punishment has extremely diminishing returns on discouraging future crimes. The only other impetus for a longer sentence is if you think the defendant is likely to commit more crimes when released. Besides that, longer sentences are hard to justify.
I do think that Sam Bankman Fried will commit more fraud the second he is able to. He hasn't shown any remorse, and he just blames everyone else for this mess even when there's dead-to-rights evidence.
Everyone keeps repeating "first time offender", but I think that term is kind of misleading.
If I stole exactly one empty car exactly one time, then yes, I'd be a first time offender in the sense everyone thinks it. If I stole a thousand empty cars, and only got caught after the 999th, then sure, legally I'd be a "first time offender", but I would have still committed the crime a thousand times.
This wasn't a one-time clerical error that he failed to report. This was an intentional bit of theft that kept going for years. It's really not a "first time offense", and I don't think it's fair to categorize it as such.
Punishment should be good enough deterrent for others. Otherwise it would be worth for someone to consider to commit a first time non-violent crime to steal e.g. $10m and get 5 years sentence, suck it up (or even commit such crime in country that has good prisons like nordic countries) and then enjoy retirement after still being young (after hiding your cash loot). Most people will never earn such money during 5 years and many will never earn during lifetime.
> Punishment should be good enough deterrent for others.
On that subject: The Russians seem to have leaked videos of the accused ISIS terrorists being tortured: "Though the goriest clips were not shown on state television, the brutal treatment of the defendants was made clear. And the decision by the Russian authorities to showcase it so publicly in court, in a way they had almost never done before, was intended as a sign of revenge and a warning to potential terrorists, analysts said." [0]
Will it work? Doubtful, because:
1. We should never underestimate the human susceptibility to overconfidence — and to rationalizing away warnings from past experience: "Well, when I do it, I won't make their mistakes." (Cf. the first chapter of The Right Stuff, describing several episodes in which a military test pilot gets killed in a crash; with each fatal crash, the dead pilot's colleagues think, How could he have been so stupid? I'd have never done [fill in action]. Yeah, right ....)
2. Plus: That sort of thing just motivates the real fanatics to escalate the cycle of revenge and punishment. (I'm rereading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August; she describes how WWI started out in somewhat the same way.)
I don't see any much how this is related. I remember in a book "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie To Everyone — Especially Ourselves"
There was a quote something like "We don't lock our doors because we are afraid of people stealing, we lock our doors because it is an easy way to take away the temptation to steal from a lot of people who would otherwise be honest"
Very good book and it showed via study that there is some threshold where at one point more people would be dishonest. It there would be completely no punishment for any stealing (even if non-voilent) I'm pretty sure more people would consider stealing.
TLDR; the idea of a punishment is not to completely prevent such behavior in the future in society but to reduce such behavior across whole society.
I don't even normally believe in "punishment" because I don't actually think it works. I think SBF will spend 20-25 years in prison, continuously blaming every human on earth except himself the entire time. If he thought what he was doing was wrong, he wouldn't have continued to do it for so long.
That said, I also have no reason to think that if he's not locked away, he won't just do the same or similar scam again. He hasn't shown any remorse, and he just pretends to be ignorant of all the crimes. If not put into jail, I suspect he'd just go to a country with difficult extradition laws and do some other cryptocurrency scam from there. Putting him in jail for 20 years at least avoids it for 20 years.
Punishment does work. What do you imagine instead? Nothing? Quoting [0]:
First, that punishment has three purposes – retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence – does not entail that each of these purposes must be realized in a given act of punishment in order for that act to be morally legitimate. For example, we may justly imprison a recidivist thief even if we know from experience that he is extremely unlikely to change his ways as a result of his imprisonment and even if circumstances make it unlikely that his particular imprisonment will deter other thieves. Similarly, the fact that a given act of capital punishment may not fulfill all of the ends of punishment does not by itself suffice to make that act morally illegitimate.
Second, while there is obviously a sense in which capital punishment can prevent rehabilitation, there is also a sense in which it actually facilitates rehabilitation. How so? Consider first that a wrongdoer cannot truly be rehabilitated until he comes to acknowledge the gravity of his offense. But the gravity of an offense is more manifest when the punishments for that offense reflect its gravity – that is to say, when the principle of proportionality is respected. A society in which armed robbery was regularly punished with at most a small fine would be a society in which armed robbers would have greater difficulty coming to see the seriousness of their crimes, and in which they would for that reason be less likely to be rehabilitated. Similarly, a society in which even the most sadistic serial murderers are given the same punishments as bank robbers is going to be a society in which sadistic serial murderers will have greater difficulty in coming to see the seriousness of their crimes, and thus will be less likely to be rehabilitated.
I should clarify. I think punishment mostly makes the punishee angry with the punisher. I don't think that they generally feel like they are paying their penance. If they didn't already think that what they were doing is wrong, I really don't see how they are going to suddenly start just because they were punished.
I generally think that the way that Scandinavia does prisons is better. I think that punishing people specifically with the intent of making their life worse is viscerally satisfying (the retribution part of that quote), but I think it's not actually a good thing to organize a society around increasing suffering. The US has a higher murder rate than Western European countries, despite having stricter punishments, including the death penalty. There can be thousands of factors that influence that, obviously, but it doesn't seem to be massively deterring crime.
I think prisons are basically a necessary evil; there are certain people that are antithetical to a functioning society, and so it's probably better to separate them from most people. I think the point should be, though, to not view these things as "punishment" but more "a chance at reformation".
Prisons in the US used to have college education programs, and job training programs, so that when you left you had a means of supporting yourself that wasn't criminal. If I understand correctly, this is still the case in Sweden, and I think that's a good idea.
Now of course, there are humans that are so warped that really no amount of job training is going to help them (e.g. a Jeffrey Dahmer), and at that point you really do just need to treat it like punishment.
I don't know that it will actually "deter" anyone, I think most criminals think they're not going to get caught, but I think it comes down to the much simpler "it's hard to commit more fraud when you're in prison".
I'm not going to say it's impossible, maybe he could be managing this big crypto empire from jail, but it would certainly be harder to do all that from prison.
professional criminals absolutely think about what’s getting prosecuted and how much hard time you’re looking at. It’s a business to them so it becomes just a part of the risk equation.
For the “isolation from society” i think it’s the least compelling part of lengthy incarceration. You can probably achieve the same effect with just house arrest and other such restrictions
I believe he will immediately start new scams and rope in fool me twice grade investors and be very effective if he has a nice WFH environment instead of the filtered mail and computer with no network kind of an environment.
He probably is a higher risk of racking up 25 more years every 18 months than a shank specialist.
That's the thing; I think a lot of the violent offenders who steal money in prison are often just desperate people. They never had a lot of money, so they mug someone and steal the wallet and car of someone that they think is better off with the hope of actually having money. It's still wrong, I don't support it, but it's at least a much more sympathetic action.
People like Sam Bankman Fried are much harder for me to feel bad over. He was never struggling to pay rent or having to worry about not being able to afford groceries next month. He was already well off, and just decided to gamble with other (poorer) people's money because he wanted more money.
This means, to me, that this was a more cold and calculated thing, not something out of desperation or frustration, just greed. Robbing someone that you think is rich is bad. Robbing someone you think is poor is something supervillains do. If he's already been able to square that circle once, I see no reason that he wouldn't be able to do it again.
Forgive me for not crying over how he might actually have to pay consequences for his actions.
> I don't know that it will actually "deter" anyone…
I think there is probably a significant number of people who wouldn't normally be criminals, and thus aren't technically being "deterred", but would end up being just that little bit less scrupulous if they regularly see prominent examples of criminal behavior going unpunished.
Deterrence would involve beheading him this afternoon.
Really, my preferred punishment for him would be a sentence of 25 years working in a non-managerial, non-ownership hourly position in the quick-service restaurant or janitorial fields, earning not more than the Federal minimum.
No, that's bad for us, as we would be on the hook to subsidize his upkeep.
I want him to join the working poor. I'd accept him getting EBT or Section 8 as part of his sentence...maybe.
Breaking and entering into someone's house and stealing their cash is very different from having an obligation to pay them out cash and not fulfilling it. While it may be the same amount of money, it's a radically different relationship between parties.
Your logic is strange. With robbery, the primary crime is the violence (or para-violent threat), and not the theft. This is easy to demonstrate: the punishment for breaking into someone's home in many jurisdictions is essentially the same, even if you steal nothing.
> Sam Bankman Fried stole billions of dollars [1], probably often around $1000 at a time from tens of thousands of people. If going with my logic, he should be getting a lot longer than 25 years, upwards of hundreds or thousands of years.
Apparently that logic applied to Bernie Madoff. He got 150 years. How are these cases so similar and yet got radically different sentences?
Even more, Madoff actually turned himself in. I doubt he was "remorseful", mostly just realizing how insolvent he was, but it demonstrates at least some accountability on his end.
> How are these cases so similar and yet got radically different sentences?
Partially in that SBF's victims will get "100%" back, based on the USD value of their holdings at the time.
Madoff victims, especially the wealthily got a large haircut on their holdings and clawbacks on money they had taken out as far as 5 years back from sentencing.
Also Maddoff's fraud went on for 15+ years, SBF's was maybe a year to 18 months at the most?
These two cases are so widely different that you can't really compare them except at a superficial level, ie they were both fraud, and that's about where the similarities end.
> These two cases are so widely different that you can't really compare them except at a superficial level, ie they were both fraud, and that's about where the similarities end.
I have to disagree on that. Mostly because the order of magnitude of both scams is the same (billions) and both destroyed how many lives?
And sure, maybe FTX victims will get 100% back, but when? How long until you see that money back?
Madoff's system was only a Ponzi; there were no investments; all new clients' money was used to finance returns and withdrawals of previous clients.
SBF's system was to use clients' money to do illiquid investments. Was it fraud? YES, because he lied to his clients and said he didn't invest their money. And that's why he was tried and punished. But was it the same kind of fraud as Madoff? NO.
In law, intent is everything. If you kill someone by accident, or in self-defense, or after planning their murder for years, the law will treat that very differently; yet in all cases the result is the same (the person is dead).
Same with fraud. It's not the same if it's a pure fraud where there is no possibility that the victims will ever see their money back, or if it's a fraud where it's possible they will be made whole, even if that possibility only exists in the mind of the perpetrator, because the mind of the perpetrator is what the legal system is interested in.
You’ve identified one of the primary failures of the courts. As the number of victims raises the punishment for each victim decreases in our judicial system. Victim count is an aggravating factor and should be a multiple when calculating punishment. Instead we have a system that pretends to grant justice but is an actuality a tool of injustice and repression wielded by people whose entire perspective can be effectively reduced to might makes right. Despite our toys and complicated rhetoric we’re still just violent animals holding those with the least autonomy the most accountable and those with the most autonomy can escape the consequences of their violence indefinitely. A mass revolt or protest of the judicial system in the next generation would not surprise me in the least.
The owners, the police, the prosecutor and the jury would be far more interested in the breaking and entry charge than the $1000.
In fact, in every state of the Union, if you're facing me whilst committing the act of trespassing inside my home, I can legally punch a hole through your torso with a 9mm.
Many states (15) have a duty to retreat, not everywhere is a stand your ground state (35 states). It's complicated, but most of the time in your home there is an exception.
They specifically mentioned a scenario where someone is trespassing into the home. There isn't a single state that has a duty to retreat requirement that pertains to home invaders.
I specified that the perp is both facing me and in my home (as opposed to my possibly 1000 acre lot - I wish). This scenario is legitimate self defense in all 50 states (unlike some states in Europe)
They don't stack like that, there is a curve with points and considerations like if it's your first time offending and the malice involved. Those points correlate to years. Judges don't have to follow the points, but they almost always do and if they don't, may have to explain it or have their case messed with in appeals
> If I broke into a person's house and stole $1000, even if I didn't directly hurt that person, I could expect to get several years in prison, basically regardless of the state. Lets say three years to be conservative on this?
We are seeing this kind of crime on a regular basis in our neighborhood. The cops have pretty much given up. They also mentioned that even if they make an arrest, the bail is set so low, these guys would be out quickly. Overall, my impression is there is zero deterrence for these kind of crimes here (a pretty affluent neighborhood in one of the tech cities in the west coast)
In comparison to his cellmate, ex president of Honduras, who got 40 mandatory years this is not a super long sentence.
On 8 March 2024, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy and faces mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in prison.
I guess we can anticipate a huge spike in donations to the Democrats as people realize that they can get 25 years of prison time for the bargain price of a few million dollars.
Those same people have effortlessly pivoted to saying that 25 years is a slap on the wrist (I'd like to see them stay locked in a prison for 25 years to demonstrate they actually believe this).
...and enough people pointing that out, and making it clear that they are outraged by the possibility of that happening, makes it harder to get away with him avoiding prosecution because of his political ties.
This is likely an example of free speech and free press working to overcome corruption to achieve justice.
I think we can look at SBF's political ties and make a reasonable guess at how likely it was that there were people trying to get him a deal with minimal jail time. You don't need specific evidence of that to say it was likely happening; the outcome is obvious evidence that if that was happening, the attempts failed.
Not sure why you are bringing up Bitcoin; SBF's business didn't have much to do with Bitcoin, beyond it being one of many methods used to deposit and withdraw funds.
How much do you think an extra 5 years would add in terms of deterrence? It seems downright dishonest to characterize a third of his life as a joke.
Where I would put my energy into is making the risk of being prosecuted higher. If getting prosecuted is rare, the kind of people who are into cryptocurrency are going to figure that they’re likely to get away with it as long as they aren’t so blatant. White collar crime prevention needs to focus on changing that assumption.
The smaller players already avoid America like the plague and their avoidance is only increasing due to a zealous SEC decreasing the likelihood of successful prosecutions. Big cases make the biggest difference because diplomatic pressure can be applied, which is why it's a shame that the US flexed on the Bahamas like they did for a case that only gets 25 years.
> How much do you think an extra 5 years would add in terms of deterrence?
Your parent post isn’t arguing for SBF to get 30 years, but pointing out how a large crime which affected at least hundreds of thousands and drove people to suicide gets a lower sentence than a violent crime which affects one person.
I have no idea if that’s true in the US, just trying to clarify the point.
A friend of mine got roughly half this sentence (12 years) for possession of cocaine with intent to sell. To be fair, was a large amount of cocaine and she 100% intended to sell it. However, she lost 10 years of her life (after good behavior) for being in possession of a < $1m worth of a regulated substance. Not sure how that fits on the spectrum against stealing $8b, but it all seems pretty disproportionate to me.
Why do you think that? From everything I've read, they had no idea what was going on, they just put their names on things because their son asked them to. If anything their crime was not being inquisitive enough to ask why.
"commit a violent crime with a silencer on your pistol" is an odd way of saying murdering someone.
There is quite a difference between murdering someone, and stealing a bunch of peoples money to the justice system. I am not saying that makes sense, but it's really hard to judge a crime when the year count starts getting into 10+ years. Would you be happy if it is 5x lifetime? Or some other silly number that means nothing?
25 years is an exageration to be honest, there was never criminal intent, if anything there was too much belief in their creature, less like Madoff and more like the Long Term Capital Management guys. I don't remember them serving a single day in jail.
It goes to show that judges and prosecutors are just trophy hunters for media attention these days, as proven by the 1000s of proceedings against Donald Trump which costed millions of dollars and recovered exactly 0 dollars.
In any event this goes to show that if you are on the spectrum and can't empathize you should RUN at the first sign of things going south. This guy was in the Bahamas too, from there you can reach Cuba with an Inflatable Rib with a 40hp motor, South America too, St. Kitts and Nevis too which doesn't have an extradition treaty and is the place that many real criminals call home.
I don't know if your questions are rhetorical, but they are easy to answer so I looked them up for you. These are only the prison sentences and do not include court-mandated restitution.
Jordan Belfort: 4 years (served 22 months)
Elizabeth Holmes: 11 years
Mt. Gox guy: I do not know which guy you refer to. Two Russian men were indicted for the actual Mt Gox hack. Separately Mark Karpeles was sentenced to 2 1/2 years, suspended sentence, in Japan - but only for record tampering. He was found not guilty of embezzlement. This entire saga seems very very far removed from what SBF did.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 659 ms ] threadhttps://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-bankman-fried-be-sent...
Also, he was addicted to the internet (supposedly), he wont have access to that either.
The USA has an incredibly robust, tightly monitored and regulated financial market. The SEC, FDIC and associated regulators and auditors carefully control bank reserves, prosecute insider trading, prevent and insure against fraud.
Some people decided to opt-out of that system and send their money to an unregulated entity in the Bahamas to buy imaginary money without government oversight.
Honestly the government shouldn't have intervened here at all. The people who lost money should have been laughed at and told that's why you put your money in the regulated market. If you intentionally try to avoid taxes, anti-money laundering regulations, audits and securities law by buying crypto overseas, then taxpayer resources don't go bail you out.
You seem to wish to live in a zero trust world model where everyone is out to scam everyone at all times and "caveat emptor" if you do get scammed. We should do our best as a society to not turn into that.
Same as there's no place where murder is allowed. You can't "opt out" of parts of society. It's not even "take it or leave it", society is "take it or get out of our reach"
A lot of these people were likely acting in some level of good faith, assuming that a company so big it could afford a Super Bowl commercial starring Larry David would never scam them. I know, it's stupid, but people don't understand where the guardrails are, what FDIC insurance really is, what sort of insurance exists on retail brokerage accounts, etc. And they didn't just lose money off of crypto losing value, they lost beyond that amount off of this business co-mingling funds when they were not supposed to.
But I do not feel that badly for anyone whose life was 'ruined' over this for one big reason: they were trying to get rich quick. That's the fact that underpins so much investment in crypto. BTC to the moon! SHTC to the moon! ETCC to the moon! These people were hoping for their 'investments' (speculative gamblings) to explode in value. And they weren't planning on sharing any of it with you or me, not beyond what they're legally required to through taxes (and sometimes, not even that, like you say as well).
The victim impact testimony of ruined lives doesn't align with it.
Deterrent
I am from El Paso, which is on the border with Mexico and grew up with many kids whose parents were smugglers and cartel affiliated.
I know several parents who went to jail for ~10 years while were were in elementary school, the kids never wanted for anything, and then when the parents got out and started capital intensive business.
One parent did 12 years and got out to start a a series of high end mexican restaurants, one started a steakhouse, one bought a small hotel, one started a commercial construction company.
It's all part of the game, just how startup founders grind for years for the money.
People risk 10 years for robbing bands for a couple thousand. A guaranteed $10 million would have lines around the block for volunteers in the neighborhood I grew up in.
Speaking purely for myself, I don't feel much difference in the deterrent effect from the punishment being 5 years or 25 years. Either one would utterly wreck everything about my life, and although the latter is worse it's not enough so to change my decisions.
Prisons are good for punishing criminals and keeping them off the street, but prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime. Prisons actually may have the opposite effect: Inmates learn more effective crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize many to the threat of future imprisonment. See “Understanding the Relationship Between Sentencing and Deterrence” for additional discussion on prison as an ineffective deterrent.
———
5. There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals. According to the National Academy of Sciences, “Research on the deterrent effect of capital punishment is uninformative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates.”
I have some pretty serious doubts about it when it comes to large financial crimes where both those things are absolutely part of the process. A death sentence probably isn't going to stop someone from killing another person, they're already off the deep end of irrationality. However 25 years of prison is probably going to be a significant deterrent to someone choosing to commit billions worth of fraud, maybe the profit margin isn't that important.
Frankly, I think we need a lot more of this kind of punishment to get more trust back into our high-trust society. More rich people need to go to prison for crimes against society, because honestly it feels more like Madoff and SBF were one offs rather than business as usual.
My point along with the grand parent is that at a certain point it is more costly than it is worth in deterrence. And the data backs that up, generally.
But what that point is, I have no idea.
Capital punishment is cheap though. And more humane than life sentence. Actually I think that we should return some form of corporal punishment and shorten prison sentences for non violent crimes. Subject SBF to Singapore style caning every month and 2-3 years in prison, forbid him to ever work with other people's money and be done with him.
Getting capital punishment right is certainly not cheap, if you are worried about the finality of it.
If an otherwise peaceful person is committing fraud on a scale 1000 times larger than the next guy, wouldn’t it at least scale up logarithmically?
As a deterrent and as a punitive, I get it, but even life sentences don't seem to deter crimes that can yield those punishments.
People make mistakes, to err is human, and forgiveness should be provided to those with the capacity to change (ie harm less). Compassion is important. But if you don't believe you've done anything wrong, can we not project future potential outcomes? Prison duration is a risk assessment of harm reduction.
EDIT: Prison should still be about rehabilitation and treating humans humanely, to be clear.
Ostensibly the same thing as after a 22 year sentence, just later.
Naturally, by this logic I have to ask: why not 32 years? 52? 102? Aren't we doing society a disservice by ever allowing criminals to leave prison?
> Ostensibly
I chose this word carefully, because I think a lot of our preconceived notions on criminal behavior have not been validated by the real world, including the deterrent effects of long-term imprisonments.
Because the sentencing judge applied the guidelines provided by law as written by legislature, considered case-law, the specifics of this case and applied their professional judgement to come up with a 25-year sentence as an appropriate one for the crimes committed. If the defendant disagrees, they can appeal the sentence to get a second opinion.
You're attempting to reductio ad absurdum prison sentences - I'll apply it to your argument in turn - why send guilty people to prison at all? What's the difference between 1 day imprisonment and 60, or 6000? A sense of proportion is the difference between a black-and-white world and the one we strive for in reality.
We know the mechanics of why it was chosen. What I was asking was by your logic, 22 is less protective of society than 102, which makes me question the validity of "it protects society" reasoning. Why protect less when we have a quantifiably greater level of protection?
> You're attempting to reductio ad absurdum prison sentences
This is incredibly dismissive. We have arbitrary sentencing guidelines. They are based on reasoning, but that doesn't mean they are correct. They are fluid, change from locale to locale, and have unpredictable efficacy.
> why send people to prison at all? What's the difference between 1 day imprisonment and 60
You see, I don't think that's reductio ad absurdum at all. It's a valid question. You can argue for it and against it, but it isn't absurd or contradictory on its face.
> A sense of proportion is the difference between a black-and-white world
All you're saying here is 6000 > 1. We know this. I'm asking why 6000 is right, 1 is wrong, and why we throw away the other 5998.
The answer to all variations of your underlying question in your post is because when handing down sentences, there are multiple, oft-conflicting considerations. We don't only consider societal safety - if we did we'd just jail everyone for life.
6000 is right because it is the right point of balance between keeping society safe and the rights of the imprisoned, while reflecting the seriousness of the crime without being cruel or unusual. Prison sentences inherently take away rights from the prisoner, and this is yet another thing that's thrown onto the pile of considerations for tradeoffs which individually lengthen or shorten the term of imprisonment. It's not a binary decision like you propose (imprisoned vs not imprisoned for any crime), but finding the right balance point (likely region or volume) on multidimensional axes.
I'm not a trial judge, but I can think of the following factors off thr top of my head: nature of crime committed, remorse, amount of harm, restitution (if any), sentencing guidelines in the law, probability of recidivism, safety of society, safety of defendant, sentences issued on similar cases in the past, appeals on similar cases in the past, prosecutor sentencing recommendations, defense sentencing recommendations, time already served, culpability, the number of charges defendant is found guilty of and whether they can be served simultaneously or not, etc. You're ignoring all of these and projecting the sentence to a single dimension (societal safety).
You haven't answered why you think we imprison people in the first place (or if we should). We cant have a fruitful discussion about which sentence durations are "better" without knowing what metrics we are measuring.
This is why I asked why 22 was right and 32 is wrong. "Because the judge said so" is no more useful than my asking "why heads?" and you answering "because that's where it landed when I flipped it."
There might not be a "right answer," and I'm ok with that. But it's odd to decide it's right simply because an authority decided it was.
> You're ignoring all of these and projecting the sentence to a single dimension (societal safety).
I'm not ignoring them, I'm simply responding to the reasoning you gave. By your metrics, 22 gives 12 more years of societal safety than does 10. This is what you responded to me, and I'm trying to point out that I believe it's flawed. If there are more factors included, it doesn't make this reasoning less flawed, it's just a smaller slice of the judgment's pie.
> You haven't answered why you think we imprison people in the first place (or if we should). We cant have a fruitful discussion about which sentence durations are "better" without knowing what metrics we are measuring.
Perhaps inadvertently, I think you hit the nail on the head. We don't have metrics that validate or invalidate any of this. We rely on a set of arbitrary guidelines mediated by emotions and feelings. In a great many cases, I don't think we're accomplishing anything but pushing a problem away and pretending we fixed it.
You will save yourself and others time by steelmanning and front-loading your priors - especially in written discussion forums like HN... Unless you're one of those people who enjoy debating more than learning other perspectives. This thread should not have been this deep when I have been stating "there are other factors" in my second contribution to it, and it turns out you were agreeing all along.
This isn't what happened - my end of the conversation was a reaction to your replies and only your replies.
> This thread should not have been this deep when I have been stating "there are other factors" in my second contribution to it, and it turns out you were agreeing all along.
You did in the prior reply - at least explictly - only. Forgive me for not making assumptions of things you didn't say.
But again, my point was that if "protection of society" is a factor in this complex system, there's not much argument against maximizing that.
All that said ...
> complexity, which I suppose you felt you were strongly hinting at, but I had explicitly mentioned earlier.
This wasn't my conclusion, it was simply a reaction to getting more information in that reply than you had previously offered.
> Unless you're one of those people who enjoy debating more than learning other perspectives.
:(
Getting a reductive comment like this doesn't help.
I don't really see the harm in him working at McDonalds, for example, except maybe he'd embezzle from the till, so put him on fries.
No. Prison should be about punishment combined with rehabilitation, neither at the expense of the other.
It is perfectly OK to say that punishment, the infliction of pain, for a crime, is warranted even if it has no rehabilitative value, assuming that it is not demeaning or cruel.
Why? Several reasons:
1. Punishment has it's own value for the sake of justice. A hypothetical: Imagine there was a drug, with a 10% fatality rate, that perfectly rendered the receiver incapable of murder without any other side effects. They just perfectly gain control of their emotions and reason, or something to that effect. If a person goes and murders 50 individuals, but takes the drug and lives; they've been theoretically perfectly rehabilitated and need to be let back into society, right?
If you think, "of course not," you are now admitting that punishment has a value by itself.
EDIT: Also, this hypothetical, actually exists. Imagine this case with SBF. Imagine if the only penalty for his actions, were that he could not run a banking organization ever again, or hold more than $1,000,000 in any account that he controls. Perfectly rehabilitated, my hypothetical with the drug, in one swoop. He will never be able to commit this crime again.
I think I might very well run and do a financial fraud tomorrow. At least I'll enjoy the high life for several years. You are literally telling me, in that case, I could live for years, possibly decades (if I'm Madoff), and my only punishment will be that I can't do it again. After all, it's only about rehabilitation for myself; and to do otherwise would be punishment for punishment's sake.
2. If punishment is not given out fairly, and is only contingent upon rehabilitation; you are ignoring the rights and feelings of the victims and focusing too heavily on the rights and feelings of the criminal. Victims have feelings and rights, and considering they are the harmed, their feelings and rights ought to be first priority, and the criminal's second. Otherwise, victims feel the need to take things into their own hands. Always have, always will, as part of human nature. That's how you get societal meltdown, followed by vigilantism.
And if you think it sounds reasonable?
While there's some benefit (deterrence) to there being perceived costs to bad behaviour, it's arguable whether punishment for the sake of punishment stands up on its own merits.
In your proposed world, where murderousness is recognised as a treatable illness, it doesn't really seem reasonable to punish to punish or to imprison as a deterrent.
Think about it. Under this hypothetical (which I think is OK, everybody does Trolly Problems all the time), you should be just fine with this result. The deterrence value is there (10% chance of death), I've been rehabilitated permanently so I can be let out a week after I did the murder, it's all good. I might as well add some torture to the mix as well, because the drug will perfectly rehabilitate that too, of course, so it doesn't really matter how I did it either.
Some people are. Some people who have been victimized do forgive and ask for leniency.
There is an emotional and personal aspect to that, but typically we don't set laws that way.
I'd also argue that "it's all good" is not a fair measure for when we consider justice to be served. Practically, when there's nothing left to gain, the scale tips from justice to pure retribution.
I think you're confusing forgiveness with punishment. The two are not incompatible.
If your son hits your daughter, you forgive him immediately (you do not hold hatred or anger in your heart for that action); but you still punish him to deter the future behavior. The two are not incompatible, or at odds with one another. Similarly, it is not incompatible that a man who committed mass murder might be forgiven by the families (in that they won't hold hate in their hearts, or use his name as a curse), but the families may also simultaneously desire that the individual be removed from society.
> Practically, when there's nothing left to gain, the scale tips from justice to pure retribution.
Retribution is part of justice, and is not at odds with it. If I steal $500, I owe $500 as part of justice. If I steal $1,000; I owe $1,000 as part of justice. If I steal $10 billion dollars, a sum I shall never repay, I can only beg forgiveness and pay the most I reasonably can, for a reasonable amount of my life. For justice, at that point, recognizes that a society which allowed me to steal $10 billion in the first place, has some responsibility as well, reducing the required amount for retribution.
Not at all. You said "you should be fine with it," which is really "acceptance" rather than forgiveness, although they go hand in hand.
My point was simply that being fine with it or not being fine with it as an personal, emotional response typically does not guide modern societal rules.
> Retribution is part of justice, and is not at odds with it.
Inherently this is probably true, but we actually have laws that are intended to specifically exclude that as a factor, depending on jurisdiction.
The punishment so that the universe feels more fair to me isn't all that useful. Maybe as you suggest the mob lynchings in this case are unavoidable but I'm not convinced.
Happily (both for those who want to subjectively See Justice Done, and for those who upon reflection find it all a little perverse), the two don't really seem to be separable beyond a certain point.
A heavy sentence is safety for the criminal as well.
Hard to make that argument when discussing fraud, which by definition is intentional deception.
edit: here's the article...https://aeon.co/ideas/punishment-isnt-about-the-common-good-...
Retribution ("spite") is about getting even.
Rehabilitation is about making it so that the person is less likely to offend again when released and more likely to be of positive value to society.
Removal is about locking someone up so they cannot do more crimes.
A good prison system should balance all four.
It also seems like the population of ex-criminals couldn’t be representative of the population as a whole, right?
(FWIW I think the theory of deterrence is probably not correct, I can’t prove a negative, but the burden of proof lies at the feet of people who suggesting it I think).
There are absolutely times that I do not speed because I am concerned about the consequences of getting caught.
There are absolutely students in the school where I teach who follow given rules not because they agree with them, but because they are deterred by consequences. They refrain from climbing the volleyball net not from moral agreement, but because it will get them in trouble.
It's better for people to not commit crimes because they agree on the morals and principles involved... but if people don't agree or have a moment of weakness, the consequences are still influential.
In the case of students, they seem to try and cheat sometimes, so the deterrence doesn’t seem very effective. Anyway, the negative consequence is very disperse (it hurts the reputation of the school if they get through without learning anything). The main bad result falls on them (they waste thousands of dollars to intentionally avoid learning). They also might fail the final, not as a punishment, but as a natural result of not learning the material.
In the case of speeding, everyone here speeds. The flow of traffic is always 5-10 over the speed limit here. People are intentionally breaking the posted speed limit to go the safer speed (going the speed limit here impedes the flow of traffic and makes a more dangerous situation for everyone). I think it is more of an informal decision making process—people just follow the herd—but it is a funny example!
I understand the magnitude of deterrence effects may be in question, or that the relative worth of different types of deterrence are open to debate. But I don't really understand how something that is nearly a universal human experience can be in question. Almost everyone has chosen not to do something because of the consequences of outside rules.
Indeed, we can easily try and see. If I fail to be visible during break duty (so that students think there are unlikely to be consequences), students will climb the volleyball net. :D
> going the speed limit here impedes the flow of traffic and makes a more dangerous situation for everyone).
This has been studied and is itself a silly (untrue) anecdote.
Nope.
> I understand the magnitude of deterrence effects may be in question, or that the relative worth of different types of deterrence are open to debate.
In the context of the thread
> A good prison system should balance all four.
I thought it would be clear that the magnitude and the relative worth were the topic. Sorry if that wasn’t the case! I’m definitely not going to defend the idea that nobody has ever avoided doing something for fear of punishment (although I do think that in a well functioning society, most of the negative consequences should be natural, not artificially imposed as punishments).
> If I fail to be visible during break duty (so that students think there are unlikely to be consequences), students will climb the volleyball net. :D
I think if that’s the sort of thing you are worried about, you must be working with kids. They probably need a stricter treatment, since their brains aren’t done yet.
I think that if too many people see retribution as no longer being applied, some people will start to take matters into their own hands to seek vengeance.
The state has an interest in preventing that and assuring retribution is applied as evenly as possible, and counterbalanced by other mitigating factors (e.g. the degree of offense, the circumstances under which it occurred, likelihood of reoffending, penitence of the guilty, etc.).
So if the government would take a true rehabilitative approach, and maybe arrest people but treat them well, try to help them so they don't do the same behaviors in the future, a percentage of the population might see that as insufficient and take retribution into their own hands.
You've helped me realize why I've actually shifted my professional focus from wanting to change politics to wanting to change culture. Seems a lot of being in government is doing what the people want, and if the people want retribution, then the government has to follow it.
I hope for (and am working towards) a world in which we help people know our pain not by trying to cause the same pain to them, but by expressing our pain to them with more granularity, because the pain they'd feel as a result of retribution will never be the exact same pain we feel, as our contexts are way too complex to replicate exactly.
I really appreciate your comment, thank you for helping me think more deeply about this.
It may not be entirely descriptive, but it certainly is part of it. At some point Gary Plauché becomes common.
It sounds like you're trying to be part of the solution, which I deeply commend. Thank you also for your very thoughtful reply. It's appreciated.
Fraud? The money comes from somewhere; someone is harmed by it (Pratchett's Going Postal has a good line on it - "No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”
But maybe it also has to do with whether people feel victimized. If no one felt victimized, would we punish?
So I imagine it's probably a combination of who feels victimized and who society believes should feel victimized. Because as others may respond, white-collar crime has people who get harmed as a result of the actions, even if it's not as obvious as the person directly punching them in the face.
One could argue that even the fact of breaking the law can harm those who went through great lengths to not break the law.
Yes, I know some of the people who lost money are rich, and much is being made of that by people who want to troll by saying that's the only reason he really got into trouble (e.g., on Reddit). But that's not true: there are plenty of victims from SBFs crimes, both rich and not rich.
And in this kind of discussion I suggest it's helpful to avoid hypotheticals and to look at the real situations and outcomes relating to the case we're talking about.
So if the spite causes people to feel sufficiently afraid to do the action in the future, maybe it deters people from acting that way?
edit: here's the article...https://aeon.co/ideas/punishment-isnt-about-the-common-good-...
The perceived benefit of getting rich and famous can make it easy to overlook the downsides of getting caught.
My perception of some of these financial crimes - Madoff included - is they start off with a small slip, rather than a full dive into fraud. A lot of times it snowballs while the person responsible keeps searching for a way out.
I wonder at what point SBF would have even said what he was doing was immoral. If you're running a Ponzi scheme you think you can salvage, would you compare yourself to Madoff, or would you think "I'm trying to set things right"?
Rather, I'm suggesting that in the eye of the beholder, a very clear case of fraud might be self-perceived as a bump on the road to lawful, legitimate financial dealings.
So the question is if SBF didn't see himself as committing the same crimes as Madoff (even if he was), would Madoff's sentencing and fate even register as a potential deterrent?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Norway
Perhaps the more important distinction: if we're going to let people out of prison eventually, we should make sure that prison is a place that is set up in the best way to make that eventual return to society successful. Right now, it feels like we do the opposite.
Ouch! I hadn't heard of this before, and I gotta say I'm not a fan.
I agree with it only in principle; it seems ripe for injustice in all practical details.
If you maintain your innocence, is that a lack of remorse? Can you be any kind of 'model citizen' in prison - engaging in charity or volunteer work? Who brings the +5 year charge or provides evidence for it? The prison staff who don't find your personable, or the shrink who doesn't think you're taking the sessions seriously (if shrink visits in prison exist)?
Yep, instead of "you definitely get out of prison after X years have passed" you instead get "you get out of prison in 21 years! (or never, depending on how we feel)".
Losing 20 years of your life though will have a drastic effect on the rest of your life. As it should for some crimes.
Or is your argument we should skip from 10 to death, I'm honestly not sure.
Probably out in 17 years which is still a long time.
I was most surprised by the recommendation of medium security. Not sure how well Sam will do in a medium.
Which is why I think the sentence is too low.
There are other ways he could make reparations. One would be to have one-to-one meetings with his victims, where they tell him in person how his actions affected them.
There's a fair chance it would bounce right off SBF, because he clearly has serious personality issues.
Then again, maybe not.
That sounds more like retribution than justice. I.E. wanting to cause him pain because he caused pain in others.
Of course, i don't have a better answer by any means.
Retribution is part of the justice.
Justice would be making the victims whole.
Arguably, the social benefit is to deter more major crimes.
If all crimes were X year sentences, then once you comitted one crime you may as well continue, since the punishment is the same either way.
1) revenge ("an eye for an eye") - that's not considered a factor anymore today except as an upside-limit on the punishment, ie, the punishment should not exceed the damage caused. Here, the damage caused was immense, so don't think that'll be a limiting factor.
2) specific prevention - keep that particular perpetrator off the streets, so they can't commit crimes again. There's some argument that old people commit fewer crimes, so when the perpetrator is old enough, one can let them go. Maybe one shouldn't let SBF out until he's older than Madoff was...
3) general prevention, aka deterrence - make sure that the punishment (in conjunction with the probability of being caught) is sufficient to discourage others from committing the crime. This is problematic as apparently most perpetrators seem to think that they won't be caught (which is why capital punishment doesn't necessarily reduce crime rates). I think in this case it's good that the many, many crypto "operators" see that there is some downside in scamming people.
Definitions vary depending on context. I think of violence as a spectrum. Talking peacefully and negotiating is extremely low violence. Threats etc are more. All our war and atomics are about the limit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence?wprov=sfla1
> Some definitions are somewhat broader, such as the World Health Organization's definition of violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation."
Violence IMO is anything which causes harm or can be used to force a condition.
"Harming someone" is anything which causes harm. We have different words to describe different things. In this way, we can tell them apart when communicating with each other.
Words are defined by people. By seeing violence as a spectrum you can see the spectrum of possible responses to violence. We can then distinguish the different forms of violence with other words, like "physical"
At least if you are making statements going against the general understanding of the society you're in then make a reference to the ideas or theories that prompt you to make these statements.
Note: many forms of theft obviously involve violence.
For instance, by seeing violence as a spectrum you can see that while lying to the Nazi about the Jewish person in your attic is "committing violence" against said Nazi, you can also recognize that the lie is quite obviously justified violence -- and there is a spectrum of justified violence in that case.
When you lie to someone you damage their ability to see reality as it is, especially the reality of yourself (your thoughts, motivations, etc). Its not as severe as a punch to the face (in most cases at least) but it still causes harm.
If the punishment is life in prison with no chance of parole, it'll act as more of a deterrent.
Punishment lengths don't act as a deterrent to petty and violent crime, because the people commiting those crimes are not intelligent or are crimes of passion. Systematic fraud like this is slow, calculated and methodical.
The benefit is the deterrent. It's especially important for wealthy people who we may wonder if they greased wheels behind the scenes.
If you want somebody to cry about, cry about a man doing a life sentence for marijuana possession, not sbf. [1]
1 - https://eji.org/news/life-sentence-for-marijuana-possession-...
When you consider that a 1% unemployment rate increase generally correlates to ~5,000 deaths then you can consider gross financial negligence to have an actual tangible human mortality cost.
We just don't, because it's too indirect and your laywer would argue confounding factors until you are all dead; but don't be mistaken: financial crimes do cost lives.
That’s utterly useless. There is simply no way any sociopath gives one iota about it.
In particular since several people with crypto losses committed suicide, or worse, murder-suicide (killing their family and kids first).
This unfortunately widely held belief is measurably wrong and reeks of all kinds of biases. White collar criminals are one of the categories most likely to reoffend. Recidivism is much higher in white collar criminals precisely due to the leniency they often experience and the powerful financial motives associated with these types of crimes.
For violent crime 38.9% of convicts were arrested for new crime within 3 years of release. White collar crime on the other hand had a 58.8% 3-year recidivism rate.
White collar crime poses systemic risks which violent crime doesn't to the same extent. It undermines confidence in institutions by creating corruption and waste, enriching few at the expense of many. When it becomes normalized and widespread this kind of crime can destroy a country's economic and political systems.
https://medcraveonline.com/FRCIJ/FRCIJ-02-00039.pdf
> In examining at white collar criminals, the criteria used were any prisoner with two or fewer prior arrests, who had been convicted of larceny, theft, motor vehicle theft, or other property crime (which included types of fraud, embezzlement, etc.).
I wonder if you removed the "two or fewer" if you'd get a different result.
Another aspect of white collar crime vs violent crime is that there's no real legal concept of self defense against white collar criminals while in most places there's varying degrees of force you can use in response to a violent crime being committed against you or a stranger. With white collar crime a psychopath wearing a corporation can act with impunity and ruin your livelihood in all kinds of ways and there's nothing you can do about it.
and people will say with a straight face that defrauding large numbers of people of their money might not have numerous health / fatal consequences: anxiety, stress, divorce, loss of benefits, working longer past retirement.
It's like saying Mafia bosses or Hitler or Stalin weren't violent and dangerous because they ordered the deaths of millions with a stroke of a pen.
The "victims" knew they were intentionally avoiding government oversight of securities law, banking regulators, etc. When they lost money we should have collectively shrugged our shoulders and said that's the risk they chose to take.
*: yes stupid, not an ad hominem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
There was a trial and now a sentencing, your argument according to law is wrong.
Or would folks here suggest the numerous HN contributors who have worked in gambling tech are deserving of life in prison as well?
If SBF told everyone loud and clear "hey guys you can give me money and I will use it to gamble on my favorite crypto tokens and play board games with Caroline" then I don't think he would deserve a prison sentence (but he also wouldn't get any customers). It's the deception that makes it a crime.
I would enumerate a number of immediate logical consequences of this idiocy, but that would be illegal (a shame, really).
Personally, I'm glad SBF is being held accountable but this sentence seems very harsh, especially given that I expect all of his coconspirators will mostly be let off the hook.
If it was for me to decide - yes, absolutely.
If they committed crimes to sell tobacco (which, to my knowledge, is true for at least some of them), absolutely, yes.
And the citizenry are the only ones left who can be deterred by this message. Islamic State will switch to using suicide bombers who have no fear of torture.
My personal theory is that Prigozhin's aborted mutiny last year and Ukraine's sustained drone campaign against Russian oil infrastructure paved the way to the Crocus Hall attack. Now the doors have been opened and Russia's internal security has been revealed for the paper tiger that it is. Every single paramilitary group with a bone to pick with Russia has now been forcefully made aware of Putin's weakness and now they'll be lining up to copy these attacks. All the while, he continues to try to blame Ukraine for this despite all evidence to the contrary. Scary times to be living in Russia right now!
Hopefully he is ALSO restricted, for life, from ever working in finance again.
A felony conviction is pretty effective for heavily restricting any type of employment. The universal and cheap access to background checks means work is either places that deliberately have "hire a felon" programs or some type of self-employment, or connections with people very high up in a company. Though all those angles are also complicated if any sort of state licensing is involved.
He's already proven he's perfectly fine running his empires from countries with a more relaxed attitude to financial regulations.
I would also agree that spending a 3rd of your life in prison is in effect destroying it.
How many lifetimes worth of time were destroyed by his fraud.
It's definitely not high punishment.
The difference is consent and malicious behavior.
When I invest into stock market, it can always go down.
When you move your customers money to save your other failing company, it's fraud. There is no consent and there is malicious behavior.
Crypto repeats all failings of old-fashioned banking system we have learned over 2 centuries, except it's "with blockchain" now.
They gave him a 150 year sentence for a crime on par-ish with SBF's crimes, because at 70 there is little difference between 20 years and 100 years, so you may as well go for the shock value.
Add in the desire to be seen as doing something with sentencing inflation and your get multiple hundred year sentences.
At first I felt that 25 years was short but thinking about it, he will be ~60 when he gets out... so maybe not too short.
I can't remember all the rules but the two I do: 1. Don't do anything for less than $1M. Risk isn't worth the reward. 2. Don't use a weapon. It adds years to your sentence.
It was mostly about how white-collar crime has a much safer risk/reward ratio.
He may never marry, never have children, and will experience a very different (and far worse) life than most of the population. I have very little sympathy for the man, and I know draconian punishment is fashionable and cathartic, but I personally think this is a very suitable punishment for the very severe crime he committed.
[1] https://youtu.be/EDMinX6t1Zk?t=420
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33908850
Other noted fraud-y bitcoin exchange guy Mark Karpelès avoided prison after conviction, but the evidence was much weaker there and they only found him guilty on fraudulently inflating MtGox's holdings (a la Donald Trump); also, that was Japan.
(Fun fact; after the collapse of MtGox, Karpelès went into business with Andrew Lee, the guy who broke freenode and claims to be the Crown Prince of Korea. The world of weird internet grifters is small and incestuous.)
There is a certain point where it no longer matters; such connections would only really matter if they could get the investigation stopped. Once it goes to court, assuming it's a proper court, those sort of connections kind of cease to matter.
(Including, notably, Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1591822387267665921)
The top voted comment in that topic is saying he's going to jail. Just because in a forum with a gazillion people some people have a different one doesn't make it representative of the median/mean/etc.
Also, it's not bad to have a counter-opinion to a group; it is bad to claim a singular opinion is that of the group without any actual justification.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33908577
The post I replied to used the literally lowest voted top level comment as their basis of "HN didnt think he was going to jail". They skipped over all of the higher top level comments when making their post (you have to go to the bottom of page 2 to see the one they picked).
Their post is classic bad faith argument and I think it should receive a penalty (downvote).
There’s nothing wrong with being wrong. What’s the point?
I also know that the some of the people making these kind of takes have already pivoted to another knee-jerk, lazy take along the lines of "well, he ripped off rich people".
I'd actually appreciate it if anybody who made the original statements about Democrats not prosecuting SBF would come on and admit they were wrong.
We see this a lot in politics where accusations of corruption are used to conflate people who are orders of magnitude apart – a good example of that are the recent classified documents investigations where some faux-sophisticates tried the “both sides do it!” excuse without recognizing the difference between immediate compliance and protracted resistance on contrived grounds.
I’m not saying that SBF has no culpability, but I don’t think you should get prison time for causing someone’s suicide, or at least society doesn’t act as if it’s in any way equivalent to murder.
Failure to voluntarily participate in a work-program is grounds for solitary confinement (which entails more penalties than just being by yourself).
It could easily have crashed.
That it went in a direction that helps make his victims more whole is entirely happenstance and SBF should get ZERO credit or recognition for this aspect of restitution.
SBF hasn’t really accepted responsibility or apologized through the trial, and didn’t at sentencing either.
Judge Kaplan seems to have taken a balanced view — far from the statutory maximum, less than the U.S. wanted, more than the defense wanted.
There will of course be appeals — SBF has already indicated he will file one.
There’s good coverage of what took place at sentencing today here — https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/177334004374401064...
Also of note is since this is a federal conviction there is no parole in that system, and so unless SBF is successful in his appeal, he will spend at least 255 months in prison, that’s a 15% reduction versus the total sentence in return for good behavior while serving his sentence.
It's actually the 6th:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262962/countries-with-th...
Yes, the United States is the sixth listed, but the 5th listed is part of the United States, not a separate country. (So are several others, but I don't think Guam or the US Virgin Islands are big enough that they move the US overall rating down far enough to matter.)
I guess I'm really not sure what value there is to locking up someone like this for 25 years when in a sane system/society there should be far better options.
Hardly. Milken was sentenced to 10 and served 2. SBF will serve 7, at which point he'll still be under 40.
He won't be out for ~two decades.
Milken was released because Trump pardoned him, which I don't think says anything about how sentencing guidelines do or should work.
He was released after a sentence reduction for cooperation with prosecutors against others decades before the pardon. Both the release and pardon occurred, but the latter was not the reason for the former.
TIL, thank you! That makes me feel much better at what initially seemed like a slap on the wrist.
If it is to harm him and make the rest of the world satisfied with it 25 years behind bars seems enough to me, I don’t care if it is 25, 35 or 155. In five years I will have forgotten about this.
If it is stopping others, same thing, I don’t think that if someone is determined to do something similar would care about 25 or more years.
Then it’s to stop other bright minds from attempting anything like this - they’ll remember SBF. His crime has a price now: 20-25 years
Sincerely
The American Legal System
Obviously there is a sweet spot. For example, if you're okay with 60 years, than you're probably okay with 80. I'd imagine 20, give or take 5 years or so, is near that sweet spot, but that's just my gut feeling. Obviously statistics is key here, if there is any.
Honestly I think that would take LONGER than 50 years...
I think 25 is on the high end of a reasonable sentence. White collar crime in the US has been a slap on the wrist (if anything!) since Enron. It's time we fix that. People need to see personal consequences for such anti-social and destructive behavior. If you are a CEO, you should be afraid of profiting from the suffering of others.
You can’t ignore retribution and incapacitation. Focus solely on rehabilitation and people will take the law into their own hands while raging against the system when it comes to recividism.
We need to focus more on rehabilitation and restoration. But those can’t be exclusive of the other components of justice.
He wasted a good part of his life.
Early release means your sentence is concluded and the only lasting impacts on your life is that of having been convicted of a felony.
Media will sometimes (because this are in Manhattan) label these as a Manhattan/New York prosecutors or a Manhattan court, but it is federal, not state, prosecutors and court in New York, not New York prosecutors or court.
SBF was sentenced somewhat after 1987, so those rules don't apply to him.
He is not; there is no federal parole (for people sentenced ib the last ~37 years.) There is “good conduct time” that can reduce time served to not less than ~85% of the time sentenced, so around 21 years minimum.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39855552
We've fixed it now.
As others have suggested, likely he won't even serve the 25 though.
...Because it just simplifies to 50/2 lol.
Because instead he'll serve 21.25?
So that would be 16 years, though obviously, it's foolish to use "right down the middle" as a heuristic for something like this. (The more severe a crime, the more incentive the defense has to pretend like it didn't happen at all.)
- The geometric average is the arithmetic average of the logarithm. It places emphasis on the ratio between numbers, rather than the absolute difference.
- The harmonic average is the arithmetic average of the multiplicative inverse. It averages values by a constant numerator rather than denominator. For example, the average fuel economy of multiple vehicles makes more sense per-distance, so miles/gallon should be rewritten as gallons/mile.
- The (RMS) root-mean-square is the arithmetic average of the square. Electrical power is proportional to the square of the amperage or voltage, so AC current and voltage uses the RMS average to make the power calculations correct.
Stole unknown amounts of peoples retirement.
Ruined many peoples lives.
How is 50 years too long? The literal largest fraud case in history doesn't even have a life sentence...
We are sending a clear message, grift and steal your way to the top and then get out just in time to retire with all your stolen goods.
You know when he gets out he is gonna go unlock a dead wallet with 100BTC (or some other coin) in it and become an expat.
IMO, if we're thinking of sentencing someone to 50 years or life in prison, we should cut to the chase and execute them instead. It's faster and cheaper for the taxpayers, and arguably less cruel.
SBF may serve as little as 12.5 years, if he gets all of the jailhouse credit available to him," Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor, told CNN.
Federal prisoners generally can earn up to 54 days of time credit a year for good behavior, which could result in an approximately 15% reduction.
Since 2018, however, nonviolent federal inmates can reduce their sentence by as much as 50% under prison reform legislation known as the First Step Act.
Are you saying the article is wrong, or did you maybe not consider this possibility?
That's not an automatic reduction (or even as close to it as good conduct time), as it requires successful participation in specified activities, but it is generally available except for a defined list of mostly violent offenses.
See this guys comment...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39856162
and a million others correcting the "85%" meme that HN parrots incessantly (not sure why anyone would expect programmers to be experts on federal incarceration nuances)
There are totally good reasons for a pension fund to invest minority assets into BTC, mostly diversification (check out Modern Portfolio Theory [1]). You may calculate the risk that BTC goes up or down, but most people probably didn't expect the exchange to lose the money.
It's not the first time it happened (see Mt Gox), but FTX prided itself on being the most risk-averse. Yet it turned out all of that was based on fraud and fake numbers, fraudulent enough to even fool pension funds.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_portfolio_theory
This assumes both that he has such a wallet and that BTC will still be worth something when he gets out.
>>On 8 March 2024, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy and faces mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in prison.
We'll know more in about an hour.
EDIT: Actually, the Verge has already reported:"The judge applied a 240-month sentence and a 60-month sentence to be served consecutively."
Here's a live tweeting of the sentencing hearing; some of Judge Kaplan's remarks are really interesting.
https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/177334004374401064...
SBF was an outsider who stole from these people.
Sam Bankman Fried stole billions of dollars [1], probably often around $1000 at a time from tens of thousands of people. If going with my logic, he should be getting a lot longer than 25 years, upwards of hundreds or thousands of years. Obviously, it's not a linear relationship, the crime was non-violent, first-time-offender, etc. I'm just saying that 25 years seems pretty fair to me considering the magnitude of the crime.
I am one of the victims (well, of Gemini Earn anyway), and I think if I were given the choice, I'd probably sentence him to 20-25 years.
[1] Or at least so grossly mismanaged that there's no real purpose in drawing a distinction.
Almost definitely not, especially if it was your first crime. It’s pretty unlikely you’d even be caught.
Severity of the punishment has extremely diminishing returns on discouraging future crimes. The only other impetus for a longer sentence is if you think the defendant is likely to commit more crimes when released. Besides that, longer sentences are hard to justify.
The three purposes of punishment are retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. Him getting 25 years isn't undeserved.
Prison is not and shouldn't be about rehabilitation. It's society that requires to be less exposed to SBF, by 20-25 years.
If I stole exactly one empty car exactly one time, then yes, I'd be a first time offender in the sense everyone thinks it. If I stole a thousand empty cars, and only got caught after the 999th, then sure, legally I'd be a "first time offender", but I would have still committed the crime a thousand times.
This wasn't a one-time clerical error that he failed to report. This was an intentional bit of theft that kept going for years. It's really not a "first time offense", and I don't think it's fair to categorize it as such.
"Habitual offender" has an actual legal definition in most countries that does not align with your views.
On that subject: The Russians seem to have leaked videos of the accused ISIS terrorists being tortured: "Though the goriest clips were not shown on state television, the brutal treatment of the defendants was made clear. And the decision by the Russian authorities to showcase it so publicly in court, in a way they had almost never done before, was intended as a sign of revenge and a warning to potential terrorists, analysts said." [0]
Will it work? Doubtful, because:
1. We should never underestimate the human susceptibility to overconfidence — and to rationalizing away warnings from past experience: "Well, when I do it, I won't make their mistakes." (Cf. the first chapter of The Right Stuff, describing several episodes in which a military test pilot gets killed in a crash; with each fatal crash, the dead pilot's colleagues think, How could he have been so stupid? I'd have never done [fill in action]. Yeah, right ....)
2. Plus: That sort of thing just motivates the real fanatics to escalate the cycle of revenge and punishment. (I'm rereading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August; she describes how WWI started out in somewhat the same way.)
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/world/europe/russia-terro...
There was a quote something like "We don't lock our doors because we are afraid of people stealing, we lock our doors because it is an easy way to take away the temptation to steal from a lot of people who would otherwise be honest"
Very good book and it showed via study that there is some threshold where at one point more people would be dishonest. It there would be completely no punishment for any stealing (even if non-voilent) I'm pretty sure more people would consider stealing.
TLDR; the idea of a punishment is not to completely prevent such behavior in the future in society but to reduce such behavior across whole society.
That said, I also have no reason to think that if he's not locked away, he won't just do the same or similar scam again. He hasn't shown any remorse, and he just pretends to be ignorant of all the crimes. If not put into jail, I suspect he'd just go to a country with difficult extradition laws and do some other cryptocurrency scam from there. Putting him in jail for 20 years at least avoids it for 20 years.
I should clarify. I think punishment mostly makes the punishee angry with the punisher. I don't think that they generally feel like they are paying their penance. If they didn't already think that what they were doing is wrong, I really don't see how they are going to suddenly start just because they were punished.
I generally think that the way that Scandinavia does prisons is better. I think that punishing people specifically with the intent of making their life worse is viscerally satisfying (the retribution part of that quote), but I think it's not actually a good thing to organize a society around increasing suffering. The US has a higher murder rate than Western European countries, despite having stricter punishments, including the death penalty. There can be thousands of factors that influence that, obviously, but it doesn't seem to be massively deterring crime.
I think prisons are basically a necessary evil; there are certain people that are antithetical to a functioning society, and so it's probably better to separate them from most people. I think the point should be, though, to not view these things as "punishment" but more "a chance at reformation".
Prisons in the US used to have college education programs, and job training programs, so that when you left you had a means of supporting yourself that wasn't criminal. If I understand correctly, this is still the case in Sweden, and I think that's a good idea.
Now of course, there are humans that are so warped that really no amount of job training is going to help them (e.g. a Jeffrey Dahmer), and at that point you really do just need to treat it like punishment.
I'm not going to say it's impossible, maybe he could be managing this big crypto empire from jail, but it would certainly be harder to do all that from prison.
For the “isolation from society” i think it’s the least compelling part of lengthy incarceration. You can probably achieve the same effect with just house arrest and other such restrictions
He probably is a higher risk of racking up 25 more years every 18 months than a shank specialist.
People like Sam Bankman Fried are much harder for me to feel bad over. He was never struggling to pay rent or having to worry about not being able to afford groceries next month. He was already well off, and just decided to gamble with other (poorer) people's money because he wanted more money.
This means, to me, that this was a more cold and calculated thing, not something out of desperation or frustration, just greed. Robbing someone that you think is rich is bad. Robbing someone you think is poor is something supervillains do. If he's already been able to square that circle once, I see no reason that he wouldn't be able to do it again.
Forgive me for not crying over how he might actually have to pay consequences for his actions.
I think there is probably a significant number of people who wouldn't normally be criminals, and thus aren't technically being "deterred", but would end up being just that little bit less scrupulous if they regularly see prominent examples of criminal behavior going unpunished.
Really, my preferred punishment for him would be a sentence of 25 years working in a non-managerial, non-ownership hourly position in the quick-service restaurant or janitorial fields, earning not more than the Federal minimum.
i think you missed the whole "justice" point there.
spending 25 year behind bars with 21+ yrs mandatory seems like enough to deter most people.
I'm not sure that's a sufficiently bad outcome to deter the next crypto narcissist.
Punishment has three purposes, namely, retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence.
I also don't know how much rehabilitation actually occurs in our prisons. From what I understand, not much.
citation needed
Apparently that logic applied to Bernie Madoff. He got 150 years. How are these cases so similar and yet got radically different sentences?
Partially in that SBF's victims will get "100%" back, based on the USD value of their holdings at the time.
Madoff victims, especially the wealthily got a large haircut on their holdings and clawbacks on money they had taken out as far as 5 years back from sentencing.
Also Maddoff's fraud went on for 15+ years, SBF's was maybe a year to 18 months at the most?
These two cases are so widely different that you can't really compare them except at a superficial level, ie they were both fraud, and that's about where the similarities end.
I have to disagree on that. Mostly because the order of magnitude of both scams is the same (billions) and both destroyed how many lives?
And sure, maybe FTX victims will get 100% back, but when? How long until you see that money back?
SBF's system was to use clients' money to do illiquid investments. Was it fraud? YES, because he lied to his clients and said he didn't invest their money. And that's why he was tried and punished. But was it the same kind of fraud as Madoff? NO.
In law, intent is everything. If you kill someone by accident, or in self-defense, or after planning their murder for years, the law will treat that very differently; yet in all cases the result is the same (the person is dead).
Same with fraud. It's not the same if it's a pure fraud where there is no possibility that the victims will ever see their money back, or if it's a fraud where it's possible they will be made whole, even if that possibility only exists in the mind of the perpetrator, because the mind of the perpetrator is what the legal system is interested in.
The owners, the police, the prosecutor and the jury would be far more interested in the breaking and entry charge than the $1000.
In fact, in every state of the Union, if you're facing me whilst committing the act of trespassing inside my home, I can legally punch a hole through your torso with a 9mm.
We are seeing this kind of crime on a regular basis in our neighborhood. The cops have pretty much given up. They also mentioned that even if they make an arrest, the bail is set so low, these guys would be out quickly. Overall, my impression is there is zero deterrence for these kind of crimes here (a pretty affluent neighborhood in one of the tech cities in the west coast)
On 8 March 2024, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy and faces mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in prison.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33717992
This is likely an example of free speech and free press working to overcome corruption to achieve justice.
("This is good news for Bitcoin.")
Not sure why you are bringing up Bitcoin; SBF's business didn't have much to do with Bitcoin, beyond it being one of many methods used to deposit and withdraw funds.
I used the word "likely" for a reason.
Where I would put my energy into is making the risk of being prosecuted higher. If getting prosecuted is rare, the kind of people who are into cryptocurrency are going to figure that they’re likely to get away with it as long as they aren’t so blatant. White collar crime prevention needs to focus on changing that assumption.
Your parent post isn’t arguing for SBF to get 30 years, but pointing out how a large crime which affected at least hundreds of thousands and drove people to suicide gets a lower sentence than a violent crime which affects one person.
I have no idea if that’s true in the US, just trying to clarify the point.
In short, the forensic accounting for FTX claims they have adequate evidence they were complicit, and they've been sued for such, so far.
But, to your point, that's rather vague.
There is quite a difference between murdering someone, and stealing a bunch of peoples money to the justice system. I am not saying that makes sense, but it's really hard to judge a crime when the year count starts getting into 10+ years. Would you be happy if it is 5x lifetime? Or some other silly number that means nothing?
Elizabeth Holmes?
Mt.Gox guy?
25 years is an exageration to be honest, there was never criminal intent, if anything there was too much belief in their creature, less like Madoff and more like the Long Term Capital Management guys. I don't remember them serving a single day in jail.
It goes to show that judges and prosecutors are just trophy hunters for media attention these days, as proven by the 1000s of proceedings against Donald Trump which costed millions of dollars and recovered exactly 0 dollars.
In any event this goes to show that if you are on the spectrum and can't empathize you should RUN at the first sign of things going south. This guy was in the Bahamas too, from there you can reach Cuba with an Inflatable Rib with a 40hp motor, South America too, St. Kitts and Nevis too which doesn't have an extradition treaty and is the place that many real criminals call home.
Sounds like someone didn't follow this case closely enough
The crypto space is rife with scams, so it's good to finally see some real sentencing.
Holmes got 11 years.
The Mt. Gox guy was prosecuted in Japan.
Jordan Belfort: 4 years (served 22 months)
Elizabeth Holmes: 11 years
Mt. Gox guy: I do not know which guy you refer to. Two Russian men were indicted for the actual Mt Gox hack. Separately Mark Karpeles was sentenced to 2 1/2 years, suspended sentence, in Japan - but only for record tampering. He was found not guilty of embezzlement. This entire saga seems very very far removed from what SBF did.
Bernie Madoff: 150 years