Well... this is justice. Sadly, we don't get to see justice very often. This is life in prison, correct? I know he hasn't been sentenced but all counts is easily several life sentences at the federal level.
When do the parents go on trial? I can't see how they make it out of this without at least having all their ill-begotten assets stripped.
Have all of the people scammed been brought whole? That would be justice. Someone sitting in jail isn't justice. It is punishment for his actions. I've never understood how someone being incarcerated has become considered justice.
Yeah if they’d just let him go he’d go right out and make everyone whole again. He’s going to jail to hopefully keep other people from doing similar things. I’d like to see more jail for white collar crime - otherwise it’s just gambling.
The post your are replying to didn't say that punishment wasn't necessary, just that punishment and justice aren't really the same thing. Ideally he would be punished for his actions and there would be justice for the victims (i.e. being made whole).
He's also going to jail to prevent him from defrauding more people. Meanwhile Adam Neumann is still out there starting new sketchy companies taking people's money, most recently some crypto token thing (because of course he would). If Masayoshi Son had been less interested in saving face and more interested in getting justice, Adam might be behind bars too. One could imagine a case for fraud being made there.
"Justice is the ethical, philosophical idea that people are to be treated impartially, fairly, properly, and reasonably by the law and by arbiters of the law, that laws are to ensure that no harm befalls another, and that, where harm is alleged, a remedial action is taken - both the accuser and the accused receive a morally right consequence merited by their actions"
Yes, we in the US have a punitive justice system, which emphasizes punishment under the dubious concept of punitive deterrence over remediation and other forms of deterrence (eg poverty reduction, though that is obviously irrelevant here).
Anyway, a law institution certainly has an incentive to push their own agenda when it comes to the theory of justice.
While I agree that much more focus should be given to helping victims and much less to retribution, deterrence is also a key pillar of the justice system and should definitely be exercised here. It's likely not possible to make all victims "whole again", but we can make up for that by "making an example" to other potential criminals, showing them the "danger" of committing similar crimes. If "the next SBF" sees the risk of life in prison isn't worth it and decides against running a similar scheme, we've actually saved more people than we could've by only repaying damages to SBF's victims.
Actually the last estimate I heard was that victims might get 90% back from the bankruptcy proceedings, depending on how the Anthropic shares are handled, whether the FTX exchange is really restarted, etc. etc. Doesn't mean he didn't commit fraud, just that there is an outside chance of the victims being made whole again.
Is it terrible? If we were to remove the system and keep it gone for some set amount of time, once people realize it was really gone, would crimes not come back?
We can compare to other countries and see their rates of crime, but such comparisons are difficult to make accurately because you are judging all social differences at once, not just a different legal system. Including things like how much lead has the population been exposed to, effect of poverty and sense of community. Things far beyond the legal system.
> If we were to remove the system and keep it gone for some set amount of time, once people realize it was really gone, would crimes not come back?
Why are you comparing it to a lack of a justice system rather than to a more competent justice system?
> We can compare to other countries and see their rates of crime, but such comparisons are difficult to make accurately because you are judging all social differences at once, not just a different legal system. Including things like how much lead has the population been exposed to, effect of poverty and sense of community. Things far beyond the legal system.
Poverty is absolutely a part of the legal system—it takes the legal institution of private property, for instance, to ensure wealth stays unequal.
> Is there another justice system which is better at reducing crime (without introducing a police state)?
Many other countries—especially countries nearly as rich as us—manage a lower crime rate with a lower proportion of spending on policing and lower sentencing times. I have full faith we can improve on those systems, too—there's boatloads of evidence showing that financial safety nets invested in over decades is a much more cost-effective way of reducing crime.
Regardless, even in justice theory there are other ideologies, such as restorative justice. This is not just idle windbagging.
It seems likely that the FTX creditors will be made whole or nearly whole. This is in large part due to FTX's investment in Anthropic that did a 5X[1].
This might well be true, but it’s not the slam dunk people seem to be treating it as. A private investment round can be negotiated by as few as two people agreeing on a price. It says nothing about the market clearing price for any other investment or sale like it does with a public market transaction. Public markets give you an order book of other competing offers where you can make some reasonable assumptions about how much you could sell at which price if you wanted to liquidate. There may be no other buyer for Anthropic at or near the current price.
Conversely, it’s a private company and scarcity of opportunity to get in is also a thing. So it’s entirely possible someone will pay more than the previous round just to get in.
Basically we don’t know until the investment bankers have done their jobs.
Prior to justice-by-committee a lot of societies didn't have jails. Either what you did was so bad we need to end your life or you need to find a way to repay it even if you have to work for free as a slave to earn the money.
I don't think that would work today, but what we have today doesn't work either.
Don’t forget banishment, which isn’t really an option today. Though I don’t see why some large chunk of federal land couldn’t be designated as a banishment target.
When I was younger I flirted with a banishment alternative to imprisonment for severe recidivist offenders.
Fence in a few hundred thousand acres of wildlands.
Send sentenced criminals in with a minimal backpack of survival gear, a waterproof survival manual (including a minified calendar), and their exit date and fingerprints engraved on a piece of metal (maybe their firestarter).
You showed repeatedly you didn't want civilization, so here - you get what you chose.
Man the walls with military or national guard troops who rotate out regularly (makes it hard to corrupt them) - come within 500 yards of the wall (interior or exterior) anywhere but a defined ingress point and you'll be shot after due warning.
Approach an egress point from the interior with any other people and you all get shot. If you can't show that it's your exit date promptly on reaching the egress point, you'll be given five minutes to get clear or be shot.
I'm no longer as convinced it's a good idea, and I'm sure the logistics are massively harder than I'm making them sound. It's certainly harsh and merciless.
I've never watched it, but I may well have been aware of its existence when I first thought of the idea.
I think the concept works much better if it's wilderness, though. Even a ruined, abandoned city has an endless supply of the artifacts of civilization, so those imprisoned don't really get to understand what it is they've chosen.
>Have all of the people scammed been brought whole?
Can you ever make them whole? Even if you pay them back all their money, there is the period of time without, the fear and pain from losing it, and similar that cannot be undone. For other crimes, there is often a victim whose state can never be fully reverted. If this is our view of justice, then justice becomes an impossible thing which can never be achieved. Does such a stance risk people eventually no longer chasing what can never be acquired?
> I've never understood how someone being incarcerated has become considered justice.
Because, at least for Americans, there is a retributive mindset. "You did wrong, now I want you to hurt"; ergo, when it happens, they consider it justice.
As opposed to repairing the victim's situation and/or attempting to reform the actor/criminal into a more trustworthy/desirable member of society.
>Is there any place in the world where it isn't that way? Honest question.
Yes, many cultures don't have this Old Testament idea about justice, as if they take delight in seeing the prisoner suffering. This is more about sadism than justice.
This is how they can be OK with treating criminals humanely, not focusing on revenge and punishment but rehabilitation, not having the death penalty, giving lighter sentences, etc. Or even to have prisons that look more like motels - like the Nordic prisons.
>Seems like you’re pretty far off on a tangent? What does this have to do with SBF?
Seems like you're pretty far off the subect of the subthread? Have you read what we're discussing in this subthread? It's not SBF specifically.
Even so, if you want to see how it still ties to SBF, see the glee with which people elsewhere on this post comment about "life in prison" and throwing away the key for what is basically financial fraud.
>And if you think the US prison system is bad, wait until you see…. Well everyone else’s except a handful of Western European countries prisons.
For a western country, especially one with such pretentions of being a superior one, the "home of the brave/land of the free", constantly preaching as hollier than thou, and so on?
Uh huh. Good luck with that in real life. Nothing in this thread or in my responses ever made such a claim. You’re the one being ‘holier than thou’ and trying to make ridiculous claims.
>Nothing in this thread or in my responses ever made such a claim
Which is neither here, nor there. I didn't say you made such a claim, or that somebody in this thread did.
Just pointed that it's a be low bar to being content to be better than "90% of countries" when that means being at the bottom of all your western peers.
And that it's especially ironic given than Americans do make superioty claims, quite often, from lowly folks, intellectuals, and artists, to official statements by POTUS.
It IS a low bar, and it IS especially ironic given the expressions of superiority - regardless of whether you or others in this thread share them or not.
You don't need to have visited a place to be informed about some aspect of it, or to have a good enough idea based on related facts about it and the region's track record to use it as an example in casual conversation.
In any case, here you go: "Prison conditions in Rwanda today remain harsh and harrowing – especially for those incarcerated for daring or perceived by the authorities to challenge the government’s narrative.
Today Rwanda’s prisons are overcrowded at 174% of capacity – with the second highest incarceration population rate (that is, the number of prisoners per 100,000 of the national population) outside America, according to the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research. The institute listed Rwanda’s total prison population at just over 76,000 – out of a national population of a little over 13 million. Rwanda’s prisoners include thousands detained in connection with the 1994 genocide, the report added".
or
"significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the
government; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions"
I think you're under the wrong impression that when the parent said "Rwanda" they meant Rwanda specifically, and they didn't just use it as a stand-in for "well known third world country" with the understanding that such countries usually have horrible prison conditions.
Suppose your brother committed a crime. Do you care more about him being punished, or about him turning his life around and making amends for his actions?
Maybe from that perspective it's easier to understand why some other closer-knit societies don't value punishment as highly.
> Examples of these closer societies might be helpful
Pretty much all of Europe.
The US are often take as an example of an exceptionally individualistic society - in every sense of the word. It's also one of the most punitive countries in the world (the most punitive by some metrics). It's really not hard to find places that are both closer to the other side of the spectrum and less punitive. Drop a pin on a map.
Look. I am not an American and your answer doesn’t tell me much. A name of a country that you think is somehow representative of the international mainstream and the features of their justice/penal system that are an improvement would help me understand your point better.
Norway, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Austria, etc. Pick one. Compare them.
Or ask something specific, no one here is going to give you a full run down of every European nation's penal system along with the US one for you to compare and contrast.
My comment tries to explain a different mindset to someone who seemed surprised that it exists at all, not directly answering their honest question, but rather trying to create understanding of that different way of thinking.
There's no rebuttal here, because there was no statement that could be rebutted - assuming that was actually a honest question I replied to.
How can he pay them back if he's in jail? I'm not saying he shouldn't be sent to jail, but the whole concept of expecting someone to pay someone else back by being in jail has always just struck me as strange.
But they are going to be made whole, or nearly so. It may take a while, but the guy they brought in to untangle FTX is the same guy that untangled Enron. He's said that FTX always had enough assets to cover its obligation, at least on paper, it just sucked at keeping track of them.
Those are separate issues -- whether crimes were committed, and whether depositors will be made whole eventually. If some of the bets they illegally made end up paying off, enough to reimburse the people who trusted them, that doesn't mean it was legal or ok to take that money to make their own bets with in the first place.
And while John Ray did say they were bad at record keeping, he also said that “This is just old fashioned embezzlement, taking money from others and using it for your own purposes,” he said. “This is not sophisticated at all.”
He never said FTX had enough assets to repay its creditors. Even worse, many of FTX’s assets are worthless (the FTT tokens are a prime example of this).
What he said was he had never seen a company with such atrocious record keeping. BTW, the US government would not have charged Sam Bankman-Fried with fraud if the money was all there.
Suffering consequences for crime is, to most people, an element of justice. That form of justice also has the benefit of deterring other would-be criminals. There are those who believe there is no deterrent effect. They're idiots.
That’s reflected in sentencing guidelines. The more serious the crime the higher the sentence. Expecting to walk away from a crime of such magnitude is just not realistic.
Sometimes, it’s important to make an example out of criminals, so that future criminals are deterred. Thus, strict punishments are a social necessity.
EDIT: A lot of folks think financial crimes are pretty much victimless crimes, and thus financial criminals deserve leniency. However, just because we can’t see the harm doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. SBF has probably reduced hundreds of not thousands to penury. Those people will pay the price for his wrongdoing, possibly for the rest of their lives.
While I agree with your skepticism about imprisonment equaling justice, one element to consider is whether a victim of a crime can ever be "made whole." Even if a victim was to receive 100% material reimbursement, the act of being victimized can cause changes in life that look a lot like opportunity costs. It doesn't surprise me then that we as a capitalist society look to imprisonment (the ultimate infliction of opportunity cost) as a sort of ethereal or "karmic" reimbursement (even if I don't agree).
Not only have creditors not been made whole, no attempt has been made by prosecutors or debtors to seize tens of millions of dollars of customer funds that were paid to SBF's close relatives for "consulting" or the ten million dollars he gave to his father.
> Have all of the people scammed been brought whole?
I know zero details on where exactly the money ended up, but I have to imagine someone dumb enough to try and pull this off would have also effectively shredded a huge chunk of the stolen funds.
Lots of the money indirectly ended up with clients again.
FTX was an exchange. It was an attractive exchange partially because many things traded there offered tight spreads, ie difference between prices quoted for buying and selling. The tight spreads came from Alameda. Alameda was another entity connected to SBF.
The problem was that Alameda wasn't actually competent enough to quote tight spreads and make money off them. So they lost many to savvier customers. FTX lent money to Alameda to keep them afloat. But that money was never paid back.
There's lots of other things that went wrong. But this is probably the most ironic part: a large part of FTX's clients' lost money went to FTX's clients. (But not the same clients who lost money. And lots of money was lost in other ways.)
unfortunately people don't just steal large sums of money and sit on it. it's rarely possible to make the victims whole without unwinding a web of (plausibly) good faith transactions involving others. having the perpetrator's transgressions officially recognized and issuing a sentence that may deter others is about as good as it gets.
I think no less than 20 years but not sure about life either.
SBF did not do himself any favors with his smug attitude that caused the judge himself to scold him several times during his examination. If he was a little more remorseful I could’ve seen some more leniency but the Judge did not like his attitude from what I could read following his testimony.
First time offender, I bet he gets maybe 10 years. I was optimistic that he would be found guilty, but not on the same level as Elizabeth Holmes. She could've killed people, SBF… I think he might actually only get maybe 10 years or less.
Sorry to be harsh but you have no idea what you're talking about. Holmes was famously not found guilty of defrauding patients, only defrauding investors.
SBFs fraud totals were much, much higher than Holmes, and the federal sentencing guidelines indicate he'll be going to jail for much longer.
Eh disagree. Holmes got more than 10 years but she didn’t even try to profit by selling shares or borrowing against shares to buy a bunch of things. The scale of the financial fraud is enormous and on top of that they spent hundreds of millions of it on luxury items and influence peddling.
Michael Milken got 10 years, ended up serving 22 months, but he took a plea deal and was cooperative in other ways. SBF might have gotten similar if he had shown some contrition and taken a deal. The way he played it, he's more likely to get the book thrown at him.
Yeah Milken was responsible for way more financial crimes and actively profited off of literally manipulating the market and causing a major crash and he did 22 months and then got a pardon, but as you said, he cut a deal. Because he might be a terrible person but he’s smart and has competent lawyers.
"she could've killed people" - I agree and infuriating part of her trial is that she was not convicted of endangering patients or defrauding employees. She was only convicted of defrauding investors (some of whom were famous politicians and lost some money because of her).
That’s not how sentencing works. You can’t just add up the counts and get a number. Federal sentencing involves a Byzantine process, starting with the federal sentencing guidelines. I am not even going to attempt to wade into that since it makes even federal criminal lawyers get twitchy. That said, Ken White (a.k.a. Popehat) has suggested the time in prison would be substantial. So if/when he gets out, he’ll be elderly.
No, the judge begins with the sentencing guidelines calculations, and then takes into account a host of other factors. The judge has significant (but not absolute) discretion in choosing a sentence. As a general matter, white collar criminals more often get downward variances than others. But we’re still likely talking in the decades worth of federal prison.
> That’s not how sentencing works. You can’t just add up the counts and get a number. Federal sentencing involves a Byzantine process, starting with the federal sentencing guidelines.
In what way? Deciding the sentence may be complicated, sure; mostly due to the fact that the US system (ideally) wants to be lenient on first-time or very occasional offenders and strict on habitual offenders. (Which isn't always how it works, sadly, due to judge biases)
However, once you receive your sentence, it's relatively simple. You get a charge or multiple charges with a length of stay and an eligibility for parole condition. It then gets marked "concurrent" (time in prison, after the sentencing date, for other crimes counts towards its requirements) or "consecutive" (its time needs to be served independent of other charges). From there, you start with all of the consecutive terms lined up in order of severity and the concurrent ones stacked alongside.
There are sometimes other terms for release, but they're usually enumerated pretty well.
That all being to say, your answer doesn't really answer the person who's asking. It's relatively easy to figure out the release date and minimum parole date from that. In fact, both are usually listed clearly on their sentencing documents.
The guidelines are 618 pages long. There are considerations for the person's history, for their pleas, for the # of counts, for the type of crime, for the victim impact, for the felon impact, for the societal impact, for precedent, for the type of intent & hundreds of other things get mixed in to the judgement as well. There's a good reason this will only be complete by March next year.
Yes, again, for deciding the sentencing. OP is complaining about knowing how long he'll be in jail after being sentenced. At which point it's trivial to deduce release date and earliest possible parole.
> This is life in prison, correct? I know he hasn't been sentenced but all counts is easily several life sentences at the federal level.
There is no a sentence yet. Deciding the sentence has yet to happen, so OP's answer to the grandparent is 100% correct: it's foolish to try to calculate the sentence right now, we just have to wait and see.
If anything, you comment goes to reinforce OP's point: you yourself list 3-4 different variables that need to be determined for each charge.
Meh. This is society taking revenge on an individual by locking him up and offering him no chance for redemption. Maybe that's the best form of "justice" we can do for now, but let's not celebrate it too much.
We don’t know yet. They’ll get consideration for sure but it is unclear where on the Nxivm scale of sex cult enablers they’ll get. In the case of Nxivm, Raniere got life in prison but two of the biggest enablers of the sex cult, his co-founder Nancy Salzman and Smallville’s Allison Mack, are both already out of jail. Clare Bronfman who was primarily on the money and intimidation stuff was sentence to 81 months and I think that was the highest of all the accomplices who turned against him and pled out.
Personally, I feel like someone like Allison Mack did way worse crimes than the uggos in the FTX polycule, but I don’t know enough about the sentencing statutes here to know if they’ll get more time or not. I feel like they will, but we’ll see I guess.
They pleaded guilty to federal felonies. I wouldn't call it getting away with it so easy, even if after sentencing they don't face much serious prison time. The whole point of the trial, corroborated by the "kid" witnesses, was that SBF was calling the shots and thus 1) his crimes were far more serious and 2) the mountain of evidence made the prosecution's case so strong as to make the idea of a "sweetheart" deal for him moot.
115 years maximum. I haven’t been following the judge closely enough to have a feel for how much they’re going to throw the book vs let him off but I have to imagine it’ll be the book given his attitude throughout. But that one rapist, Brock Turner, did like a year of community service so you never know.
Say what? My brother’s a probation officer. I’d 100x rather be under a PO’s thumb and sleeping next to my own wife in my own bed in my own house than to live in even a minimum security prison.
Probation sucks. The only thing it sucks less than is prison.
Is that because they want to be in prison, or because they're fuckups who think they can get away with violating the terms of their probation but get caught?
I think mileage varies man. You get a good probation officer and can basically do as you please. You get a crappy one and they show up randomly everywhere. It also depends on if you are pushing the rules. If your probation officer doesn't trust you it's going to be a bad time
I'll get a remote job and eat poptarts delivered by amazon. I won't leave the damn house unless the PO says I have to. He can show up and watch me program anytime he likes.
Knowing someone who spent a few years in jail, there is no way they'd agree. Maybe a year on probation is more of a hassle than a year in jail (I don't think so, but acknowledge the possibility), but whatever generous spirit I'll give to this balance gets more and more out of whack the more time we're talking. And Brock shouldn't have been looking at one year in jail, he should have been looking at something a little more standard for the crime of sexual assault.
What do you think the standard punishment for sexual assault should be? 100 hours community service? One year in jail, no chance for probation (seeing as how it's "worse" and all, even though it's basically an option to live outside jail or go straight to it if you'd prefer to as you claim so many do)?
Yeah. The fact that they're in probation in the first place is probably because they have a hard time acting like adults in the first place and haven't past the stage of "kid throwing a fit" except in an adult's body
Well shit, I sure did not consider the possibility that mentioning the canonical example of sentencing shenanigans would bring someone garbage enough to defend a rapist out of the woodwork, but here we are.
FTR, I’ve been on probation and therefore must vehemently disagree with your uninformed second-hand opinion.
In prison you have no freedom, but no responsiblities. With probation you have fake freedom with a bunch of extra shit you have to do - and pay for - yourself.
Miss an appointment because of a car accident? Probation violation.
Miss a court hearing due to traffic? Probation violation.
Don't pay fines or restitution because you're broke? Probation violation.
Miss community service because you're sick? Probation violation.
Not employed because the economy is in the shitter and no one will hire a felon? Probation violation.
There are so many ways to get fucked that are out of your control and the punishment can be prison anyway.
So it's all the downsides of prison - because you can still end up there - but with a bunch of extra life disrupting headaches that are super stressful because the consequences are harsh. And you have to pay for all of it yourself.
Like I said, I know a cop that would take prison over probation.
If your freedom means anything to you than prison and probation aren't even comparable. This is silly. It's very basic, either you have some freedoms, or you have none.
Why do you think the convicted (their representation) push for probation over jail time?
by the same logic you could argue that prison is strictly worse than probation, because you can always swap probation for prison by violating it. and yet, most people at least try to satisfy the terms of probation when given a choice.
Yeah but in exchange you get to sleep in a bed, eat real food, walk more than 8' in one direction any time you want, and a thousand other life experiences that are better than in prison. The fact that so many prisoners try to get out of prison into probation also undermines your point.
When do the parents go on trial? I can't see how they make it out of this without at least having all their ill-begotten assets stripped.