Maybe this is my secret middlebrow self surfacing, but I don’t understand the point of meting out a sentence that exceeds the human lifespan, let alone the life expectancy of a 71-year old man.  There is a certain rhetorical satisfaction in assigning a big number instead of telling someone, “You’re going to prison for the rest of your life.  They we will incarcerate your ashes.”  But 150 years is almost embarrassing.  The State appears cartoonishly punitive handing down sentences like that.  It’s not like he’ll be serving consecutive sentences for numerous little frauds that could each be undone.

Not that he shouldn’t.  What’s funny about the scale of Madoff’s crime is how it dwarfs everything.  The federal sentencing guidelines for fraud are only calculated up to $400 million.  That’s 1/162 of the $65 billion Madoff purged from existence.  It’s a pretty serious dent in capitalism, considering it’s what Michael Jackson would have earned from royalties on Thriller if he had reaped $596 per copy sold.  It’s the equivalent of the GDP of Kenya or Oman.

Such an abstract crime, too.  The sentence is an unwieldy attempt to match punishment to offense, but the crime itself is unpunishable.  As with “too big to fail,” there is “too big to punish.”  It would be like slashing the Mona Lisa with a knife.  You don’t have to be too beholden to metaphysics to believe that that would be a hideous deed, but what form would adequate retribution take?

Genocide can probably be assumed to be the worst crime there is.  The methodical attempt to eradicate an entire people and their culture can’t be beat!  But it’s collective and the appropriate remedy, apart from imprisoning its perpetrators, is to restructure the political system to protect minorities.  And really, it’s to shore up any weaknesses in the law to make sure states of exception do not occur.

Madoff’s crime was essentially apolitical, and in spite of lingering doubts about his family’s and employees’ participation, more or less the work of one agent.  Asset seizures will be a drop in the bucket; Ruth Madoff only has so much mink.  Fixing the SEC so that when confronted with memos about Madoff of the “Bin-Laden-Determined-to-Attack-US” variety, it doesn’t go after Martha Stewart might be another priority.  But there’s just no way to repair the damage of causing that much money to evaporate.