it's good that he was caught and punished, especially since white-collar crimes are relatively under-prosecuted. i'm more mixed about the severity of punishment--restitution plus 7 years in prison. on one hand, it seems fair relative to the sentence lengths of other crimes, but prison terms seem onerous and overly-punitive overall to me.
For theft and other forms of damage that are not irreversible, the deterrence was achieved not by threatening with prison, but by forcing the guilty person to pay a multiple of the value of the stolen goods or of the damages.
The multiplying factor varied from country to country. Where laws were less severe, a thief had to pay double or maybe quadruple, but where laws were more severe a thief had to pay ten times the value of what he had stolen.
So even today this would be a better punishment. Nobody has any advantage if someone who has stolen 10 million goes to jail, but if he had to pay back at least 20 million, then that would be real deterrence.
In antiquity, those who could not pay back the required amounts risked to become slaves, a method which would not be applicable today. Nevertheless, in the present society where it is almost impossible to hide, it should be easier to enforce payment without such extremes.
Just to be clear - I ma not a fan of how democracy like US manages their prisons, prisoners, and folks after prison - yes its kind of a death sentence for any serious job, it doesn't matter much if you would be a stellar citizen and employee afterwards for rest of your life. Clearly pure punishment and no correction, 3rd world medieval style. But that's another topic.
Kids that do stupid things for meth should get a) treatment for addiction and b) be removed from society until deemed worthy of coming back. In some place, like, dunno, lighter prison err correction facility (depending on the crime committed)
That’s a bold statement since I don’t remember a question on the census asking me how many crimes I didn’t commit due to fear of retribution.
Still, it seems like there are easier ways to make more money. eg if you're a really good salesperson, there are plenty of companies -- mine included -- that will happily double or triple that $360k/year.
If everything had matched up perfectly at the end, there is little reason for anyone to ever look into anything.
He also maybe have parked the stolen money in an offshore account for a few years, and not gone crazy shopping before he even left that job.
Like seriously, do none of his coworkers who know how much he makes wonder about the size of his mansions?
I think that's true for his work email, but he could probably have gotten away with using a different laptop for the files.