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Should Madoff Die for Our Sins?
When the story popped up in my news feed Thursday morning, it definitely gave me pause: “Bernie Madoff asking Trump to reduce his prison sentence for massive Ponzi scheme,” said CNBC.
Bernard Madoff has been incarcerated in a federal prison in North Carolina since July 2009, after he pleaded guilty to 11 counts of financial crimes, including fraud, money laundering, perjury, and theft totaling more than $15 billion. Judge Denny Chin sentenced him to 150 years in prison, which meant Madoff would die behind bars.
Ten years after being sentenced, Madoff, 81, has evidently decided he doesn’t want to do that.
I cover a few “beats” at The Crime Report at the Center on Media, Crime and Justice, one of them being white collar crime. It’s a subject I find deeply fascinating, though I’m often struck by how under-studied and under-reported it is compared to other types of crime. Even criminologists devote fewer resources to it. “In a very indirect kind of way, the lack of investigation by criminologists of multinational corporate crime compared to their investigation of street or index crimes does contribute to the impunity of these acts and omissions, or to the normalization or routinization of these crimes,” admitted Gregg Barak, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and author or editor of 20 books, in an…
