Trump's lawyer is going to serve just three years in prison for his crimes. The attention is on his crimes for Trump, but actually he is also being sentenced for large-scale personal tax evasion. The sentencing memorandum says:
I like that.
And it says a great deal that this has not grabbed the attention.
In the long run I hope it gets the attention it deserves.
Hat tip: Rasmus Christensen
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I’m delighted that he’s going to prison for the tax evasion and it’s a shame that this aspect of his criminality is not better publicised.
I fear that the ‘campaign finance’ issues are likely a little trumped up (pardon the pun) given that the money was not from donors and that John Edwards was acquitted when he actually, and apparently knowingly, used donor money a while back to similarly make a personal scandal ‘go away’ – which makes it too easy for the Republicans to decry a witch-hunt.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/us/politics/john-edwards-charges-dismissed.html
I agree that he was done for tax evasion and got what he deserved but I do not agree that tax evasion is the reason he was done. I suspect that, like Al Capone, the reason he was done was entirely different. It’s just that once the decision had been made to try to do him, tax evasion was the only thing they could be confident of successfully doing him for.
These crimes need to punished severely but I think it would be better to delete 99.99% of the offender’s net personal wealth and require them to perform in a disciplined way a variety of rehabilitative, restorative, and therapeutic activities in the community over a long period of time.
There are very few people currently in prison who pose such a high risk to public safety that they need to be physically removed from the community.
I would reserve prison for those exceptional cases. Perhaps 5, 10, or 20 percent of current prisoners are in that category.
The rest should be subject to a massive financial penalty and a requirement to perform a range of activities in the community. They need to work on their attitudes and behaviours and pathologies and do what they can to make amends for the harm that that they did.
I would ensure that they had access to a Job Guarantee, public housing, free public transport, free education and training, free health care (I would make those things available to everybody).