prison is such an interesting concept. violent people need to be physically separated for the safety of the population. but for a crime like this maybe it would be better to just give him 5-10 years in prison but never let him deal in finance again. i would rather have him on a road crew tying re-bar than using up tax payer money in prison...
Prison is also a deterrent for future offenders, if everyone is knows/feels all they will loose is their license to practice finance then you will have lot more financial crime than there is.
It is not a deterrent for crimes of passion or ones of desperation. If you are angry and upset you are not going to be stopped by rational thinking of risk/reward outcomes, similarly if you are hungry and homeless this will not be on your mind and no amount of deterrent will stop when there is little to loose.
You cannot stop murder, rapes, petty theft etc with punishments you can deter white-collar crimes which are executed with a lot of forethought as this is a critical decision making factor.
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To be clear I meant loosing financial license is not same as loosing medical or legal license, no one is spending 10 years of education and hundreds of thousands of to get one, so it is not much of deterrent to threaten loosing it.
To be a deterrent, it just needs to curb some percentage of behavior. Not stop it completely. Do you think people are murdering at the same rate as if there was no punishment? It could be, but I would bet the numbers would go up significantly.
> maybe it would be better to just give him 5-10 years
No it wouldn't, what an ignorant thing to say. People like this go immediately back to scamming as soon as they leave prison, and some times from the inside.
