With billion dollars you can probably hire better lawyers
This isn’t the source of the trend; the sentencing guidelines for fraud are actually literally, explicitly logarithmic. The government recommends directly that sentences follow a curve of 2x price --> 2 more years.
Do other crimes, for example murder, follow a similar pattern? Like, at some moment they might execute you, but what are they going to do if you kill 10 times more people?
There seems to be a MAX_PUNISHMENT in the justice system (we don’t devolve into torture, etc.), which is reasonable. But with things like armed robbery you would get convicted for each individual count, not on a log scale.
In which case, a group of rationalist criminals should precommit that if they get caught, they will randomly choose one of them, who will accept the blame for everything.
This is (I suspect) a very common strategy among even regular criminals. You can think of it like a trade between law enforcement and gangs; the government gets their clearances and avoids the potential embarassment of a partially-solved case, and the serial killers send only the John Wayne Gacy to jail.
This isn’t the source of the trend; the sentencing guidelines for fraud are actually literally, explicitly logarithmic. The government recommends directly that sentences follow a curve of 2x price --> 2 more years.
There seems to be a MAX_PUNISHMENT in the justice system (we don’t devolve into torture, etc.), which is reasonable. But with things like armed robbery you would get convicted for each individual count, not on a log scale.
This is (I suspect) a very common strategy among even regular criminals. You can think of it like a trade between law enforcement and gangs; the government gets their clearances and avoids the potential embarassment of a partially-solved case, and the serial killers send only the John Wayne Gacy to jail.