US Senator says Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg should face ‘possibility of a prison term’

The whole article can be boiled down to this quote:

“I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to — and let me underline this — the possibility of a prison term. Because he hurt a lot of people. And, by the way, there is a precedent for this: In financial services, if the CEO and the executives lie about the financials, they can be held personally accountable.”

I wholeheartedly agree. If more CEOs and other high ranking people were facing jail time for their crimes, we would have a lot less corporate fraud in the US.

It's very easy for someone at the top of a company to look around, see that they can do whatever they want and get away with it because it's a white collar crime and think to themselves, "Why am I not getting rich by breaking the law like the rest of my peers?"

Maybe they'll have to give some of the money back or be barred from working in their industry again, but they'll walk away filthy rich and never have to worry about money again for the rest of their lives.

Jail time changes that calculation for a lot of people. And that's exactly what it's supposed to do. We lock people up for dealing heroin both for public safety and as a warning to other heroin dealers. We should do the same with white collar criminals.