How many bank officials that were responsible for even more losses are serving their 67 years in prison?
Money is just money. It's just means of deciding who gets to use the stuff our machines produced. Serious crimes are those that do actual damage, like killing someone, destroying his life or destroying serious amount of some resource. Making money change hands unfairly doesn't warrant life of inprisonment.
I am totally for jail time for bankers. But saying money is just money, isn't true.
Money buy the food, pay the rent, pay the doctor. In today's world, stripping someone from his money may be equal stripping him from his dignity.
In Greece for example we had hundred of suicides in the last years due to the austerity measures. People who worked all their life lost their jobs, hit rock bottom and between ending up homeless or imposing on their relatives, they chose to end their life.
Are you sure that none of the 45.000 or so victims of the defendants didn't have their life ruined or commit suicide?
I'm not saying theft is not at all harmful. Only that it's not so serious as killing. When you have money stolen form your bank account case is usually more complicated. This is a failure of bank security and sometimes banks take or are forced to take responsibility. So often the victims of theft don't suffer more than a bit of inconvenience and the real victim left is the bank or insurance companies, and they are only victims of risk that is inherent to their business. Of course they pass cost of this risk to all of their customers so you might argue that they are harmed. But they could pick bank that deals better with the risks. But the banks that deal better with the risk could also have higher prices just because their competition has higher prices, so, some win, some loose. Money unfairly changes hands, but nothing was actually lost apart from effects of emotional turmoil. Just some money was transferd to people that have larger tolerance for risk than typical worker/consumer.
Almost all people recover even after actually loosing all of their savings, and I don't know if those particular criminals wiped the accounts clean. I sincerly hope that noone commited suicide because of this but among 45000 people there bound to be some unstable ones. I'm not sure if criminals can be responsible for such cases. At least not much more than a singer who recorded sad song that nudged some poor bloke to commit suicide when he heard in on the radio.
I am very sad about what's happened in Greece but I see it more as a sytem failure than result of criminal activity. I'm not sure why someone would kill himself to not be a burden to his family after loosing a job. I'd personally just pack up and walk towards border without saying goodbye. It's same act of cowardience but without much of accompaning waste.
Money is just money. It's just means of deciding who gets to use the stuff our machines produced. Serious crimes are those that do actual damage, like killing someone, destroying his life or destroying serious amount of some resource. Making money change hands unfairly doesn't warrant life of inprisonment.