Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Lying on SEC filings should get you imprisoned.

This costs me a lot of money, and I don't want to give free money to people just because they are dishonest. Ban the guy from being the CEO or a board member of a publicly traded company for 10 years. Inexpensive and an appropriate punishment for the crime.

Let's reserve prison for people that absolutely cannot integrate with normal society.

View on HN

Just fine the equivalent of their combined earnings(salary, bonus, and any stock options) for the years that they lied on SEC forms. The people don't have to spend money in taxes imprisoning them, and it provides enough deterrence to just not do it.

All you'll be doing then is turning him into a high-priced industry consultant or public speaker. Not that prison always prevents that (See: Michael Milken) but it at least puts the brakes on it for a few years.

More than that, I believe. That would also create a good incentive to avoid lies for the rest of executives.

Haven't there been studies proving that a prison sentence is a poor deterrent? I mean, on the face of it, the fact that there are still prisons full of criminals sort of points in that general direction. (At the very least, it shows that people do a poor job of comparing risk of prison vs. reward of wrongdoing.)

I was referring to "ban the guy from being the CEO for 10 years", not prison sentence.

As for prison effectiveness - that's a huge question that I'm just not qualified enough to discuss. I think US is a bit too zealous in this regard, but I'm really not ready to advise here.

Milken is an interesting case. He literally created the market for high yield ("junk") bonds, and a lot of the charges the feds threw at him were because creating a new market meant breaking stupid regulations about yields and such.

Regardless of whether they're stupid or not, they're still regulations. Unless he was breaking the laws as a form of civil disobedience, he was still basically a guy breaking the rules to make more money.

I'm not anti-Milken by any means, but based on Connie Bruck's "The Predator's Ball", Drexel Burnham Lambert was scurting a lot of regulations when it came to appropriately labeling the types of deals and securities in which they were engaging. Milken might not have been running any blatant frauds or insider trading rings, but he was at the very least misrepresenting DBL's activities and or avoiding proper filings altogether.

Let's reserve prison for people that absolutely cannot integrate with normal society

Are you really making the case that no white-collar criminals should go to prison? I guess I can see where you're coming from, but I personally think that we need more financial fraudsters behind bars. You know, the whole "rule of law" and "deterrence" business.

This is probably more about our overcrowded jail system sucking up huge amounts of taxpayer money. The point is likely supposed to be that its one more person in jail, which is bad, but because that person happens to be a CEO, suddenly its about how he shouldn't go to jail because he's a CEO. It's a matter of unfortunate implications.

If we decriminalize recreational drugs and release all of people imprisoned for non-violent drug charges, we'll have more than enough space for crooked executives.

Just a friendly suggestion.

As someone looking in to USA society from outside - it certainly seems that at least investigating non-incarceration methods for dealing with most of your "prison population" would be worthwhile. There's a gigantic industry entirely funded by taxpayers - there's no doubt at least some of the "military industrial complex $1000 hammer" type behavior going on. That industry is legally required to "increase shareholder value", rather than minimize the cost-to-the-taxpayer.

The prison system shouldn't be about either "increasing shareholder value" or "minimizing cost-to-taxpayer". It should be about rehabilitation, justice, and public safety.

Part of the problem is that it's really hard to win an election against someone who has positioned themselves as "harder on crime" than yourself. As a result, we have legislators pushing for tougher and tougher prison sentences, mandatory sentencing, etc. I don't know how other countries deal with this pressure, but I would be eager to see the United States do better.

Your counterpoint is way off topic… What you're saying about the business of prisons here is 100% true, but you could increase prosecution (and imprisonment) of white collar fraud by 10X and the effect on the overall US prison population would be small.

Personally, I think "deterrence" has an incredibly awful success rate. I also think that, if prisons should even exist, they should only be for physically dangerous people. Never for "money" crimes. Being locked away from society for years, your life destroyed and likely abused or even raped seems beyond "cruel and unusual" to me.

Personally I think the whole concept of prison is primitive and should be done away with. If someone is violent then they have something wrong in their head and should be treated. I know that currently asylums can be worse places than even prisons, but once we move away from this draconian "people must suffer so I can feel better about wrong in the world" strategy we can move much more focus on getting treatment and detection right.

> If someone is violent then they have something wrong in their head and should be treated.

This is not always possible.

But we could try. What good does it do to lock them in a cage?

If they're untreatable, locking them up in the cage doesn't do them any good - it does society good.

Being locked away from society for years, your life destroyed and likely abused or even raped seems beyond "cruel and unusual" to me

You know that politically-correct killjoy who always speaks up about how distasteful and offensive prison rape jokes are? I'm that guy.

That seems like a compelling case for reforming the prisons into a place where you're punished for your infractions against society, but not abused or raped. Prison shouldn't completely destroy someone's life, either. We need to have meaningful ways for prisoners to re-enter society as productive citizens. Otherwise, things never get better.

"Let's reserve prison for people that absolutely cannot integrate with normal society."

To do that, we'd have to find an effective alternative to prison. Financial / professional penalties are clearly not enough - if the penalty for getting caught in a crime that makes you millions of dollars is just paying some penalties, why not take that gamble? From a purely rational standpoint, it would be the logical thing to do - if you win, you make millions, if you get caught you just cough up the money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com