Last Updated on February 6, 2022
When I learned of the sentence for Bernard Madoff, the man accused of the biggest swindling job in U.S. history, I couldn’t help being struck by the patent absurdity of it.  Madoff got 150 years of jail time.
Why?
He’s 71.  The current life expectancy in the United States is about 78 years, but that’s actually for people who are born today.  People born 71 years ago faces a shorter life expectancy; in fact, he may already have outlived the expected life he’d have had when he was born.
But let’s say he lives another 30 years.  He’d be 101, with 120 years left to go.  It’s an extremely safe bet that there’s no way he’d live to be 221 years of age.  But what if, somehow, he did?  Would they really wheel a 221-year-old man out of jail to start his life anew?
There’s something wrong with this picture when we have to come up with an impossibly-long number of years when we mean “life.”  But we can’t say “life” because a life sentence, almost always, isn’t.
There are times when I wonder whether such a defendant ought to be given the right to be euthanized.  I realize that he didn’t murder anyone, so the death penalty wasn’t really an option.  Then again, he robbed the “happily ever after” portion of many people’s golden years.
And back in December, we learned that one of Madoff’s investors had been found dead in a possible suicide.  If the suicide were the result of the loss of all that money in Madoff’s scheme, is Madoff responsible for that death?  I know, it’s a big gray area, because you’d almost have to know that the person committed suicide solely because of the money and would never have done so if his path had never crossed with Madoff’s.  Those aren’t things that would be easily proven in any real way.
But one wonders how much jail time the swindling of others’ life savings really is worth.  A life sentence for an already-elderly man, somehow, just doesn’t seem like near enough.