[slapshot]

When 65% of the amount that the headline uses came from Toyota and Bernie Madoff [1], I'm not sure that this article actually supports that conclusion. Reasonable people can debate whether Toyota should have paid $1.2 billion for the unintended acceleration debacle, but it's not in any material way related to being a police state. I'm not sure that reasonable people can debate whether Bernie Madoff should have disgorged his ill-gained profits, but it represents $1.7 billion of the $4.5 billion total. Taking from Madoff is hardly gangland material.

[1] http://www.thecrimereport.org/news/crime-and-justice-news/20... -- Linked from the link.

[MCRed]

That's %65 of the amount that would otherwise have potentially gone to pay liabilities to the people wronged. Instead of going to the victims of those accidents or that fraud, it went to the government.

This is the amazing thing about the government provided judicial system-- for many crimes, instead of making the victim whole, the "justice" system instead profits via fines, or denies the victim justice by incarcerating the criminal.

Which would be better for, say, a person convicted of stealing a car and then wrecking it-- going to jail for 5 years or paying the owner of the car 5 times its retail value (over the next 10 years)?

The "justice" system will put him in jail, making it effectively impossible for him to repay his victim and make the victim whole.

Whether this supports an argument for a police state or not, it certainly supports an argument for corruption-- denying victims compensation and taking it for yourself (in the form of fines, or more bodies for the prison industrial complex which pays you back in campaign donations) is corruption.

[maxerickson]

It's probably going to the victims:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-25641476

It also seems it was paid by JP Morgan.

[mrob]

Fines and imprisonment are intended to be deterrents as well as retribution. In America it's not politically viable to scale fines according to the perpetrator's ability to pay, so jail time is the only deterrent that will work on rich people. Wealth varies greatly but everybody gets roughly the same lifespan. Although in practice it doesn't work so well because rich people also have better ability to avoid prison time.