How does it generally work? Surely the money you steal / embezzle will be taken from you when you get caught no?
This means some people exit jail penniless and some exit jail with hundreds of millions.
Perhaps the authors of the paper should have presented the median rather than the average; however as a typical college student I was more focused on delivering the assignment than criticizing the researchers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21275859
But even if that wasn't true, you could still compare expected value. For instance, if you had an 80% chance of successfully embezzling $8 million without getting caught, and a 20% chance of serving 2 years of jail, this would translate to an expected value of $1 million per year served.
The expected number of years served is gonna be something like, say, 80% chance of 0 years, or 20% chance of 10 years, averaging out to 2 years (I'm making these figures up). So if you get $2M from that, then you're averaging two years.