Yeah. American prisons are overflowing with guys who got caught pulling $220k out of the bank in a structured fashion. This is the real source of our prison overcrowding.
Your comment is sarcastic, uncharitable and unproductive.
Obviously the narrow specifics around this case are not the sole cause of prison overcrowding. It's been driven by a massive expansion of criminal codes and decades of ratcheting minimum sentence guidelines upwards and get tough on crime efforts such as "three strikes" laws. The result has been a flood of people imprisoned for money laundering, recreational drugs, petty theft and an even larger number who are simply awaiting trial. The specific case in this story is just one example.
Are you asserting that overzealous prosecution of money laundering is a significant source of prison overpopulation? I'd love to see some sort of supporting evidence for this claim.
As it stands now, it looks to me like you're just lumping nearly every crime together and insinuating that because some are overpenalized that all are.
Prisons should be home to people you're afraid of, not for people you're mad at. It seems that a lot of prosecutors forget that (for a multitude of reasons)
Prisons serve multiple purposes. They are not merely there to hold scary people. Indeed, most scary people are not in prison nor should they be. Being scary is not a crime.
Prison can be an entirely appropriate punishment for nonviolent crime. For certain classes of crime, it seems the most appropriate punishment because it can be difficult to punish effectively with fines. If you only fine for financial crime, you make lucrative financial crimes more appealing. Worst case they just take your ill gotten gains.
Obviously the narrow specifics around this case are not the sole cause of prison overcrowding. It's been driven by a massive expansion of criminal codes and decades of ratcheting minimum sentence guidelines upwards and get tough on crime efforts such as "three strikes" laws. The result has been a flood of people imprisoned for money laundering, recreational drugs, petty theft and an even larger number who are simply awaiting trial. The specific case in this story is just one example.