How about adding up the number of years he caused kids to be inappropriately sentences to juvenile detention for kickbacks, and then multiplying by 3x?
Two decades in jail plus the stigma of that conviction is an awful lot of punishment. The man might still be of use to society, just not around the law.
This punishment fetish is why we have so many people locked up in our jails compared to ANYWHERE else in the world. Can you actually say that this makes our society safer or more productive?
The irony is that your reflex of "lock him up and throw away the key" was EXACTLY how those kids got long sentences.
The problem is that we lock up the wrong people. We mis-prioritize our resources locking up non-white collar criminals when we should be focusing on the people who actually cause the most chaos in society -- people like Michael Conahan.
The reason there's so much violent crime in America is because people like him greedily steal the resources that could be going to fixing the systemic issues and use those resources to bribe and change the system so that it further entrenches their power.
Even if American society should reduce the number of people in prison it must still lock up those who are proven to threaten and destabilize society.
People like Michael Conahan must be removed from society permanently be that life in prison or execution.