What to do with Waksal

Nothing befits a liberal better than demanding the scalps of corporate fat-cats who’ve swindled their way to multi-million-dollar estancias, private jets and $7,000 shower curtains. I know, because I’m one of those liberals.

These greedy men – and, alas, they are mostly men – didn’t just steal from other suits like themselves: creditors, big shareholders and competitors. Their real victims were the proverbial little guys – billions of dollars hustled from millions of little guys’ pensions, savings, 401(k)s and small stock accounts.

For example, this week, Sam Waksal, the founder of ImClone and escort to Martha Stewart was sentenced to more than seven years in the Big House for insider trading. He dumped his stock when he got early word that the Food and Drug Administration was about to dump his company’s experimental anti-cancer drug. He was also ordered to pay $3 million in fines and $1.2 million for trying to scam the state out of sales taxes due on some fancy oil paintings that he had purchased.

So, when I say I have no sympathy for these scumbags, believe it. That’s why what I’m about to propose will strike some of my readers as strange coming from a liberal.

You see, Sam Waksal is also a physician. Rather than 7 years in the clink, Waksal ought to be sentenced to 7 to 15 years in a halfway house located in a place where people don’t have doctors.

In this country, we have a one-size-fits-all sentencing system. But is that the most efficient when it comes to non-violent offenders? Clearly, for the murderers, rapists and armed robbers, well-built prisons are the answer. When it comes to non-violent offenders, I have a different solution.

It’s simple: Before sentencing, non-violent offenders should be assessed for their skill sets. If the offender has a skill to offer, they should be offered a choice – so many years doing hard time, or up to double the number of years living in a halfway house doing what you might call soft time. This means they would be forced to spend their days contributing to areas that need them.

And this doesn’t really entail a bias towards upper-class criminals like Waksal who might have law, medical or accounting degrees. This would apply to any non-violent offender with a useful skill – plumbers, teachers, electricians, truck drivers, welders … you name it.

Halfway houses might be located in America’s inner cities, but might be established in the Mississippi Delta as well. Think of the public-service projects that are wasting away, sorely in need of assistance, but not able to get it because the compassion-fatigued conservatives of the Bush Administration, some spineless Democrats and a public conned into believing that they are somehow “undertaxed” refuses to adequately address our common needs.

I invite all of you who have children in public schools to take a good look around the next time you drop your kids off in the morning. Paint chipping? Playgrounds cracked and pot-holed? Can’t get a school nurse when your kid gets sick? Education budget doesn’t balance? Well, there are guys who just might be willing to help – at least when faced with the alternative of doing hard time.

Guys like Waksal and all of the other tax cheats, stock swindlers, creative accountants, embezzlers, perjurers, obstruction-of-justice artistes, offshore-account kings and the other riffraff that discredit legitimate enterprise are wasting their considerable talents in prison. Having first stolen from the little guys, they next move on to burden the public purse with lengthy trials and appeals followed by a long stay on the public’s dime in prison.

And fining them never really raises enough money to compensate either the government or their victims. (Strangely, there are very few cases of documented poverty among these guys after they get out of prison – no matter how large the fines, they always seem to return to that penthouse in the East 60s and that second house in the East Hamptons.)

As I said, truck drivers are also needed for public works. What I’m suggesting here is something that my conservative friends should applaud – a new kind of chain gang. Only now, the chains of these gangs will bind them to the communities from which they stole rather than to other thieves.