Innocent merriment
The wrong people are in jail. I was reminded of this the other day after watching an episode of “Last Week Tonight” that focused on the opioid crisis and how the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, have pretty much escaped liability.
Oh sure, there’s a big financial settlement, but it’s the usual class action thing: an impressive-sounding cumulative number, lots of money for lawyers, insufficient money for individual plaintiffs, and a big payment delay that means no one is really paying anything.
Now imagine doing something intentional that leads to more than 500,000 deaths. Shouldn’t prison be an option for doing that?
I guess those guys were too murderous to fail. You need to think big in life (or death).
The Sacklers aren’t the only example of this odd phenomenon. Imagine, for example, you run a company that sells a substance — say, a fuel — that’s destroying the environment and will, as a result, probably end up killing and/or displacing millions. No one’s going to jail for that sort of thing either.
https://www.courthousenews.com/innocent-merriment/