Let Madoff cool his heels inside.
The pokey. The joint. “Inside.” The ol’ Graybar Hotel.
Call it what you will — it’s where Bernard Madoff belongs, for the rest of his life. No bail arrangement should be made, despite his lawyer’s pleas.
This isn’t a legal argument (which is good, since I’m not a lawyer), but an ethical one.
Madoff has confessed to swindling as much as $65 billion from a host of people and institutions who trusted him. This list includes one of the world’s great voices of conscience, plus many nonprofits that fund all sorts of good works.
If Madoff had used a physical weapon to rob a store of 1/10,000,000th as much money, no conversation about bail would be held. We’d say he’s a menace to society and keep him behind bars until sentencing. Even if he never planned to use the weapon, even if he never meant to hurt anyone, we’d keep him inside — and rightly so.
Madoff’s weapons weren’t tangible. He was much more sophisticated than your typical gunsel. It doesn’t mean the harm he did was any less real, or that his punishment — for stealing ten million times as much money — shouldn’t be equally severe.
Let his family talk to him through a pane of glass.
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Photo by Ben, used under a CC-Share Alike license.
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Why stop with Madoff or stop there. Give him the space next to Ken Lay, or at Ken’s old cell. Or Lay’s COO…what was his name ?
But let’s think about all the other arguably criminally malfeasant behaviors that are demonstratively sociopathic and destructive of the glue that makes business and markets work:
http://llinlithgow.com/bizzX/2009/03/crisis_leadership_leaders_and.html
As angry as people are (and boy are they PO’d) we’re still not wrapping this whole discussion in the proper cultural or ecological context.