At the risk of screwing up the Catskills joke if one of the three penologists is Irish, I’m with Jonah.

In 1989, I convicted a mafioso dope-dealer who was a really bad guy. The technical sentence imposed was life imprisonment plus 140 years, to run consecutive. That sounds bizarro, but in fact it made perfect sense. The judge imposed the maximum sentence — one of the counts (continuing criminal enterprise in narcotics) called for life imprisonment, seven (separate multi-kilo heroin deals) called for 20 years apiece. To impose the maximum sentence meant to give the most you could give on each count and then run all the sentences consecutively. The judge wanted the guy to do life, so he imposed the life sentence and imposed maximum sentences on the other counts so that, in the (unlikely) event the court of appeals ever reversed the life sentence for some technical reason, the guy would still have to do the 140 (i.e., effectively life). That was exactly the right thing to do.

I really don’t see the big deal about Madoff. Given the staggering amount of the fraud, the guidelines obviously called for life-imprisonment. That a lot of the investors should have known better is irrelevant. They were still defrauded — and, in point of fact, a lot of the investors (not the ones we’ve heard a lot about but less prominent people who lost their life savings) should not necessarily have known better. Ramesh’s point is, on a certain level, fair enough in the sense that when a mobster kills another mobster, everyone in the equation knew that this was foreseeable and our hearts don’t exactly bleed for the victim. But when we sentence the murderer, it’s still murder — even if the victim had it coming. And those guys usually get whacked with life sentences, as they should.

If Madoff had gotten 30 years, that would effectively be a life sentence (federal law got rid of parole 22 years ago). The 150-year sentence imposed says you get life for this staggering amount of fraud no matter how old you are when you commit it. What’s so bad about that?