Theranos founder Holmes ordered to jail after appeal snub

Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes' attempt to stave off her time behind bars has been rejected, with a federal judge denying her request to remain free on bail pending appeals and reaffirming the court's order for her to report for incarceration later this month.  Holmes' appeal was denied by Judge Edward Davila of …

[Youngone]

Never thought I'd see the day

The whole Theranos story is completely weird.

How some totally unqualified nobody managed to round up all those billions in investment money, and conned former cabinet members and generals to sit on the board of her imaginary company I'll never know.

Unless it was because of greed. She used their greed against them didn't she?

It should be some sort of cautionary tale, but it won't be. Next up: Sam Bankman-Fraud!

[VoiceOfTruth]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

-> some totally unqualified nobody managed to round up all those billions in investment money, and conned former cabinet members and generals to sit on the board of her imaginary company

Good sales tactics from her, greed from them (as you indeed mention). Look how much money we can make, they said. Never underestimate just how greedy some people are. Fraud and greed are as old as time, which is why it goes on day in day out.

[Brian 3]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

o contrare mon ami, those cabinet members and former generals are where now? They knew it was a risky venture, but not to themselves. Airtight "they lied to us!" excuses.

[Plest]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

As the tagline says, "The only colour that counts is green.".

Most of us are happy to have a penny more than we can spend me included, while others just want those numbers on the bank statement to keep climbing ever upward at any cost. Each to their own I guess.

[Bbuckley]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

Greed from her too. Not to mention psychotic narcissism.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

She used their greed against them didn't she?

Probably. And an element of plausibility. The microfluidics stuff is commonly used in medical diagnostics, and was leveraged in their marketing. Just as simple as the fingerprick millions of diabetics use to check their blood glucose.

Then kinda glossed over those tests rely on specific reactions, and testing for all-the-things via a single drop and a magic breadmaker was.. stretching the science a little too far. The suprising thing about how successful the scam was is the lack of due diligence from investors that should have known better. There were plenty of sceptics pretty much from the time it was announced.

[Bbuckley]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

No plausibility to anyone who had the faintest scientific idea how microfluidics work. The big crime here is ignoring science.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

“How some totally unqualified nobody managed to round up all those billions in investment money, and conned former cabinet members and generals to sit on the board of her imaginary company I'll never know.”

Because she’s hot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

"Because she’s hot."

Personally I think she looks like Jimmy Page (the real one).

[Alumoi]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

Lava is hot. Red chili is hot. Her? Please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

People who want to believe, for whatever reason, are easy to con if they've not the core competency, they'll even argue against the experts if you hit their emotions, there's also various dubiously legal easons to invest in such obvious scams

An outrageous scam like Theranos is so big and implausible that it has to be true, nobody would be so brazen surely and, after all, everyone knows million to one chances come off nine times out of ten.

[uncredited]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

> How some totally unqualified nobody managed to round up all those billions in investment money, and conned former cabinet members and generals to sit on the board of her imaginary company I'll never know.

Tell them exactly what they want to hear, either they're going to make loads of money or as is more popular now, they'll save the world!

[Groo The Wanderer]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

The "cautionary tale" is that most investors don't know squat about the tools and technologies of the companies and businesses they invest in, so a good shyster can con them out of a significant chunk of change. Had they actually had a device which could/should have worked in theory, but was unreliable, they'd have even been off the hook because they "tried their best." But that wasn't the case here, clearly - there was no product. At all.

I really don't understand on what grounds one could try to appeal the conviction, given the details of the case that have been made public. It is almost like convicted criminals insist on filing an appeal because they're expected to, even if they know they're guilty to the core.

[doublelayer]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

"It is almost like convicted criminals insist on filing an appeal because they're expected to, even if they know they're guilty to the core."

It basically is. If you have enough money to hire lawyers, then why not gamble on getting your sentence removed. It's not as if it's going to make things worse. The same thing happens whenever the risk profile of some action becomes too unbalanced. Whenever people get the chance to put a cash value on years of freedom, they tend to value it very highly and pay for the chance if they can.

[Bbuckley]

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

Next up, Greta Thunberg, Autistic kid with absolutely no qualifications whatsoever convinces World leaders to crash World economies. Oh wait, no. It's the World leader idiots who should be locked up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick, have a third baby! Because a responsible person who cares about their children receiving a healthy and happy upbringing would definitely choose to become repeatedly pregnant after learning they're going to prison for 11 years.

[imanidiot]

The cynic in me is convinced she only had those babies as a tactic to either get leniency ("you wouldn't sent a caring mother to jail forever would you??") or as a way in future to get leniency during parole hearings trying to get out earlier.

I'm just hoping the husband decides to do what is right for the kids, divorces her and gets sole custody of them. Better for them to grow up not knowing who their mother is probably.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is wealthy America, so don’t be surprised if her parents go to court and deem the husband not a fit and proper person to bring up their grand children…

[Malcolm Weir]

Kinda by default he's going to get effective sole custody until December 2032...

[Michael Wojcik]

The US distinguishes physical custody, which Holmes will indeed have to relinquish, and legal custody. The latter involves such matters as choices in medical care and schooling. It would be entirely possible for family court to grant the husband sole physical custody (possibly to be reevaluated when Holmes is out of the clink) but shared legal custody.

[Michael Wojcik]

It's not impossible that she wanted kids for the reasons parents more commonly cite¹ and also thought it'd help with her defense, sentencing, or subsequent treatment.

But to me she seems like someone who quite possibly has antisocial personality disorder and doesn't really care about the effects her decisions have on others. Running the Theranos scam would certainly support that conclusion. People are capable of enormous self-deception; but it's a bit much to swallow the idea that you toyed with peoples' lives for years, and then tried to weasel your way out when caught, yet have some capability for sympathizing with others.

¹You know, like, um, wanting to have children. Actually now that I think about it, I'd rather not wade into the quagmire of what the "correct" reasons for having children are. Let's just assume there are some and move on.

[Youngone]

As everyone knows, the correct reason for having children is for the free labour.

At least that is what I was told, but it turns out to be a lie.

[John Brown (no body)]

Only the mother gets the free labour. Sometimes hours and painful hours of it.

[Derezed]

Just a tasty appetiser

This is nothing. I can’t wait for the SBF kabal sentencing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Judge sentences SBF to the electric chair, just so they can have a headline saying...

Sam Bankman Fried²

[jollyboyspecial]

I often wonder if this thing didn't actually start out at intentional fraud.

If you don't know much about how lab tests are done you might think something like: if it only takes a few drops of blood and a little machine to test for a particular disease, why can't you test for all diseases the same way? It might then be a logical leap to get to why couldn't you use the same few drops of blood to test for multiple diseases? And if you think that's a sensible question then, why couldn't you do that with one machine.

Now a sensible, intelligent person would probably have done a little research at that point to find out if there were good answers to those questions. The current wisdom is of course that some blood tests are quite complicated and require more than a few drops of blood. Testing for one disease will generally render the sample useless for further tests. And given the answers to the first two questions the third question is a none starter.

However, maybe just maybe you somehow got to question three without properly considering the first two questions. You saw a machine used to test for a single ailment from a few drops of blood and being impetuous and arrogant you thought "I bet I could develop a bigger version of this machine that could diagnose multiple conditions from just a few drops of blood and from there decided to stay up a company to do so.

If course if you were going to do this then you'd need to employ doctors and scientists and even if you were pretty rich you'd need investment. So you go out to get investment. Rather than being entirely honest you tell potential investors that you are developing this machine. The honest thing might have been to say that you were researching the viability of such a machine, but hey you're arrogant enough to know you're going to succeed.

Investment secured you start pulling a team together at which point you start to learn that maybe this is going to be harder than you thought. Not only would you need to make the machine, you'd even need to develop some new testing technologies. But hey you're arrogant, you know you'll succeed, but maybe it's going to take more investment.

At some point in this process you've probably lost confidence in your convictions the question of course is at what point did they go from thinking that maybe they could succeed to knowing they couldn't? And were they still chasing investment at that point?

I don't think we're dealing with a couple of idiots here. They seem reasonably intelligent people. So *if* they originally thought they could succeed then they must have arrived at the realisation that they probably wouldn't fairly quickly.

The puzzling thing for me is that while there have been many cons that followed a similar pattern most such cons involved cutting and running, or at least planning to cut and run. In this case if they did plan to cut and run they were clearly a long way from reaching that part of the plan when it all fell apart. Which gets me back again to the question, was it arrogance or stupidity?

[doublelayer]

I think you're probably right about how it started, but not for long. Holmes was a student when she came up with her first idea for a medication delivery system. It wasn't viable then, but researchers are making some progress on something a bit like it. Of course, she didn't want to do what those researchers are doing and actually try some stuff to see if it worked. She wanted her idea to be hailed as revolutionary, which is the same thing she wanted and got with her next idea for a testing machine. I'm sure she thought it was doable at the beginning, which helps to answer some of your other questions. She wasn't interested in learning the things needed to actually invent it, and that was probably comforting to her because if she did, she'd realize how difficult the task really was. I'm sure that for the first few years, she was thinking that all she had to do was continue bringing her genius-level management skills and eventually one of those techies she hired would get the box working and she could show it off.

"at what point did they go from thinking that maybe they could succeed to knowing they couldn't? And were they still chasing investment at that point?"

It's clear from the history that they were seeking investment until the very end. They also knew pretty quickly that they had entered the realm of fraud, even if they were still paying some people in the hopes that someone would miraculously build what they said had been built. While the way she sought investment was fraudulent from the beginning, she knew what was going on when it changed from saying that technology existed that was being developed to saying that technology was being sold when it didn't yet exist.

"The puzzling thing for me is that while there have been many cons that followed a similar pattern most such cons involved cutting and running, or at least planning to cut and run."

Your experience is different from mine. I've seen plenty of criminals arrested and every time I read an article, my brain automatically runs me through a "if I were a criminal" routine. This routine doesn't get very far because the first thing I consider is why the criminal kept committing crime when they would probably have been just fine if they stopped after a couple engagements. This is especially true of criminals who pull in millions in stolen funds, more money than I will ever see in my life, and somehow still decide to keep taking risks. Maybe my lack of desire to own a private jet means I'll never be a good criminal psychologist, but at least it means I'm unlikely to turn to crime. I've seen a few examples of criminals who got their windfall and ran away, but I've seen many more examples when they had enough money to buy whatever they wanted and still went back again and again until they made a fatal mistake. Holmes was one of them, and she made her mistake.

[jmch]

"why the criminal kept committing crime when they would probably have been just fine if they stopped after a couple engagements"

Two short answers:

1) projecting history into future - "I wasn't caught before so I won't be caught now"

2) addiction to brain chemicals that one is used to. In the case of chemicals risk-taking, but most people repeat the same patterns of behaviour over and over so that their brain chemistry will give them the 'hits' they are used to.

[John H Woods]

Also survivorship bias...

... I should imagine there's quite a few crims that pulled in a few million from crime then went straight, cases you never hear of.

[Random Commenter]

Perhaps add in a little "I'm enjoying the money and fame. What else can I do to sustain this? I don't have any other ideas so I'd be broke and ridiculous."

[Anonymous Coward]

Of al the long list of people who should have known better Walgreens must be on the top of the list.

https://news.crunchbase.com/health-wellness-biotech/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-trial-investors-board/

[imanidiot]

Judging from interviews while she was still the big thing and things that came out during and after the trial, she was entirely and utterly convinced that it should work, just that she herself couldn't figure it out. But if she just got a few billion and set a bunch of smart engineers on the task the thing she dreamt up (that everybody told her went against all known physics) it must become reality.

She was already delusional as a student before she dropped out, convinced (by upbringing and sheer force of will) that she was the next tech messiah. By all reports she was rather mediocre.

I think by the time she should have realized it was never going to work, she had built her whole life around being the next tech messiah. Admitting she had been wrong the whole time would mean a total collapse of her entire life. She probably felt that either she'd make it work, somehow, or her life was over. Add into that a toxic relationship with Balwani and she was probably convinced she'd go to jail if she DID admit it was all a lie and that continuing the charade was the only way out.

So in short, I think it started out as arrogance and ended in stupidity.

[Jellied Eel]

Judging from interviews while she was still the big thing and things that came out during and after the trial, she was entirely and utterly convinced that it should work, just that she herself couldn't figure it out. But if she just got a few billion and set a bunch of smart engineers on the task the thing she dreamt up (that everybody told her went against all known physics) it must become reality.

It was basically homeopathy. A single drop of blood, sufficiently diluted will retain the memories of whatever you're looking for. Sadly, reality tends to disagree somewhat with homeopathy, even though it has many adherents that should know better <cough>CO2<cough>.

But it retained traces of plausibility. When I first heard about Theranos, I linked it to glucometers and other gizmos that can test with a fingerprick. So all you need to do is channel that drop into a battery of sensors that can then do their magic. So I looked at how glucometers work, and chatted with a cousin who's a consultant and married to a phlebotomist. First reaction was laughter. But glucometers are pretty neat, and there are plenty of docs and testing standards that explain exactly how they work. Feed blood to a reagent, reagent generates a small voltage difference, and the meter measures that. They have limited accuracy, hence why if there's a problem, you get to go for a blood draw so there's a bigger volume of blood for a more accurate machine to test against. Since then, I got diagnosed with T2 Diabetes and stuck on rat poison, so I get to experience the process and pester the staff with questions.

And I really wish I'd invented the vacutainer.

That was (or should have been) another red flag. Or in my case, blue, pink, orange and.. green? But when I go see the nurse or phlebotomist, there's usually mutiple samples drawn because there are different requirements. So some containers don't have a preservative, some don't have an anti-coagulant and some have to be tested within a short time, or the sample is useless. Or it might be a simple volume thing and different diagnostic machines need a sufficient volume to produce an accurate test.

So I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that it wouldn't work, and could probably never be made to work, especially mail order. I also learned about the logistics of pathology. So the good'ol NHS likes to consolidate. Which means blood tests get collected and transported to a testing centre. Which means those samples can get stuck in traffic, which means sometimes having to do the blood draws again. Which meant I also learned when those delivery runs are done so I could get appointments close to those delivery runs and I didn't have to get called back because the samples had expired.

But that's just knowledge I've picked up as a curious engineer, and still begs the question why experts doing their due diligence missed all this.

[doublelayer]

"But that's just knowledge I've picked up as a curious engineer, and still begs the question why experts doing their due diligence missed all this."

They didn't. Every time she tried to get an expert to invest, they refused. She shopped it around to several biology-focused investors and they all said no almost immediately after hearing the plan. The people she got did very little research, and whenever they did, it was all about the finances of the company which she faked for their consumption. They didn't ask questions about the technology, and she quickly realized that she should stop going to people who knew anything they were talking about and focus on those who liked the idea of being part of a world-changing startup and didn't understand that what she was doing was likely impossible. She targeted those people specifically, aiming to get well-known and respected people who didn't have any subject knowledge so she could use both their money and their names to draw in more.

You don't have to be stupid to miss the impossibility, just ignorant of the mechanics. It's clear that the blood sample contains what you want to measure, and they weren't collecting or diluting it so much that they were excluding the compounds they wanted to measure. Of course, I would have asked questions like "How are you able to measure it in a small quantity when your competitors can't", but I wouldn't have automatically assumed at first that they were automatically lying because people do make advancements in chemical detection and maybe they did. Of course, had someone asked that question, Theranos couldn't provide a real answer and probably used some technobabble to get around it, so I wouldn't be likely to invest in them, but I wouldn't have known from the start that they were untrustworthy.

[Roland6]

>Judging from interviews while she was still the big thing and things that came out during and after the trial, she was entirely and utterly convinced that it should work

Seeing exactly the same reality denying mindset in the lettuce (aka Liz Truss) and her speeches to the US conservatives such as the Heritage Foundation. Although, I note she at least seems to have the sense not to make such speeches to UK audiences...

[John Brown (no body)]

"She was already delusional as a student before she dropped out, convinced (by upbringing and sheer force of will) that she was the next tech messiah. By all reports she was rather mediocre."

At least part of it is probably the indoctrination of the simplified version of The American Dream. If you just work hard enough, you will succeed. Well, as any right thinking person will know, there's a lot more to it than that soundbite! On top of that, there's the sort of quotes we keep hearing from "self made millionaires" self-help books that people hear and believe without ever reading the actual books. Quotes like "First, have a great idea". Many rarely read or comprehend the steps after that.

This woman seems to fir that pattern perfectly. She had a great idea, convinced others of the great idea, raised some money, hired people and said "Make it so!" and then sat back and waited for the product to be built.

Ideas are piss easy! Good and practical ideas, less so. I remember a dream I had many years ago which I related to my work colleagues of the time, when 8-bit computers were still the rage, of walking into a shop to buy a "TV", which was basically like a roll of wallpaper and you just cut off the length you wanted. My colleagues all thought it was a wonderful idea but none of us had a clue how it might work. I think, just possibly, flexible electroluminescent panels were just appearing as research experiments with the hope of finding some practical use if the manufacturing could be made economical at the time. Of course, we're actually sorta, almost, if you squint a bit, getting there, 40 or so years later with e-ink readers and foldable or roll-up phone screens :-)

[Doctor Tarr]

And add into the mix:

1) a culture where 'fake it till you make it' seemed to be an acceptable attitude

2) central banks / gummits pumping billions into economies through QE making cash cheap

3) FOMO on the next Apple, Amazon etc

4) messaging from young entrepreneurs and reality tv pop stars that if you want it bad enough you WILL succeed. And you're a loser if you don't.

Maybe she actually believed she could make it work at the start and then her biases took over.

[Roland6]

was it arrogance or stupidity?

It would seem a bit of both.

Phyllis Gardner, an expert in clinical pharmacology at Stanford, recalled discussing Holmes's skin-patch idea and telling her it "wouldn't work".

... "she just seemed absolutely confident of her own brilliance. She wasn't interested in my expertise ..."

[ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58336998 ]

[JoeCool]

If it's your nature to commit fraud, then no it's not intentional.

You just do it all the time.

But so what.

What's important is that she is capable of comitting fraud, and did indeed commit fraud. On a massive level.

At no time did she "fall into" comitting a fraud.

Read the book. The case for arrogance is so well laid out.

[Winkypop]

Still not serving porridge?

Rich person fakes billions in investments, gets time a-plenty before staring stir.

Poor person steals a bottle of bourbon, straight to jail, do not pass Go…

Oh how the privileged are, well, privileged.

[Malcolm Weir]

Re: Still not serving porridge?

That "time a-plenty" didn't come cheap, though. Lawyers filing plausible (but ultimately denied) motions will get anyone a delay before going to jail... the problem is that the public defender isn't going to waste time on delaying tactics when they could be working for people who might actually be innocent! So unless you're paying for lawyers, and those lawyers are impressive (and therefore more plausible, and more expensive), you don't get to benefit.

(Also there's a big difference between Fed and State... and if the defendant happens to be pregnant, it's often cheaper to let her remain outside until the birth than to take responsibility for healthcare).

[Mayday]

Aren't the yanks nice?

They let people chill for a bit before they have to voluntarily turn up at the joint and start their sentence. Here (in Aussie) you get sentenced and they take you from the court down to the van in the basement which takes you straight there. Too bad if you have affairs such as a house/family etc to deal with. Granted you might know it's coming before the actual sentencing, but once the sentence is passed, or if bail is revoked sooner, you're gone. None of this "I have to sign into the clink in a few weeks, gives me time get my shit sorted, possibly including a one way ticket to Antiextraditionistan".

I know this isnt blanket, but I know myself a few people who have had to get locked up in USA for minor offences (drink driving etc) and they were allowed to make their own way there pretty much as they saw fit. I'm guessing violent crimes wouldn't get this luxury.

[Cynical Pie]

Re: Aren't the yanks nice?

I suspect its as much to do with the expensive lawyers than anything else although I can think of another obvious reason...

[Mockup1974]

Re: Aren't the yanks nice?

Well to be fair if it isn't for a violent crime or an offender otherwise deemed dangerous or at risk of flight - why not let them get their affairs in order first?

[train_wreck]

Re: Aren't the yanks nice?

There are plenty of people here who are taken to jail immediately after being arrested and remain there for months if not years before their trial even starts, because they can’t afford bail. Sometimes it’s for minor offenses that don’t call for prison time at all, or call for a fraction of the time the person has already served. Bank account value and skin color go a long way in determining the course of events there.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Aren't the yanks nice?

"Bank account value and skin color go a long way in determining the course of events there."

Yup, in a lot of areas being black means you get let out with zero bail. And if you happen to be white and of the wrong political opinions you get locked away.

[Stork]

Re: Aren't the yanks nice?

Do you have any documentation for that claim?

[Potemkine!]

a one-way ticket to Mexico

That could be a great title for a song.

Question: is the society safer if she is locked in a brig? Punishment is deserved, but a punitive justice system may not be the best system to protect society. Looking at what Norway does, maybe other countries should be inspired by this example.

[chivo243]

who said that while she didn't pose a flight risk... That's a nice thing to say, but not reality.

[TheFifth]

She definitely posed a risk to those who received incorrect blood test results.

[SundogUK]

The punishment also serves to deter others.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah - deterrence works. Extensive use of the death penalty in the US has worked wonders on the country's murder rates.

Few criminals have any awareness of the consequences of their actions. That's why they commit crime.

The Theranos crooks probably expected they'd never be found out. Or would have ran off with the loot to somewhere that didn't have an extradition treaty long before the shit hit the fan.

[Anonymous Coward]

Extensive use of the death penalty in the US has worked wonders on the country's murder rates.

this is because they don't execute politicians that vote the laws promoting the use of firearms for solving disputes...

[Azamino]

Deterrence effect

In the decade 2001 to 2011 thirty released killers in England and Wales were convicted for 29 murders and 6 manslaughters between them. That's at least 35 people who died unnecessarily.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16638227

The death penalty might not be working in the USA but is the system in England and Wales any better?

[Doctor Tarr]

Re: Deterrence effect

Those stats are horrific but you are choosing to be somewhat economical with the truth. 16 of the released killers were in prison for manslaughter not murder so would not have faced the death penalty.

From DPIC, although the stats are readily available.....

"The death penalty carries the inherent risk of executing an innocent person. Since 1973, at least 190 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated." https://deathpenaltyinfo.org

That's exonerated cases and does not include cases where the defendant was innocent (or would have had the punishment downgraded) but no one has made a case for them. And how many more would have had a long / life sentence rather than death if they were a different colour or from a different social background.

Deterrence only works on people who are unlikely to commit a crime in the first place.

[jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid]

Re: Deterrence effect

That BBC story doesn't say how many convicted killers were released in total over that decade, only that "over 30" killed again. Neither does it say how the proportion of convicts who killed again compares to the overall rate in the population as a whole.

[R Soul]

Re: Deterrence effect

Since there is no capital punishment in the UK, I'd say the system is working as expected.

You might want to look into the number of people who were wrongly convicted of murder and probably would have been executed if the death penalty was available. The Guilford Four, the Birmingham Six, the Cardiff Three, the Bridgewater Three and the Glasgow two immediately spring to mind, The post 1972 list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_miscarriage_of_justice_cases#United_Kingdom is horrific.

[Androgynous Cupboard]

Interesting, thank you for the Norway reference. Without a punishment aspect to it I imagine the UK and US wouldn't accept this, however effective it was in terms of reoffending rates. Our politicians, press and populace are way too vindictive for this to fly.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The country also has one of the lowest overall crime rates on Earth"

When you are already dealing with a very small problem you don't need to do too much to keep it under control.

Norway is also known as one of the whitest countries. Maybe that has something to do with things.

[Anonymous Coward]

Norway's worst murderer is Andres Breivik, a pink-skinned neo-Nazi who seems to share the same stupid and racist views as yourself.

[doublelayer]

Safer from what? There is safety from further fraud schemes from her directly (given her statements there's no indication of any feelings of guilt), and the potential deterrence to others thinking about fraud. It's difficult to quantify these effects, but they exist to some degree.

Similarly, there are different ways to rehabilitate someone. People who commit crimes because they didn't see other options may be easier to rehabilitate by showing or giving them opportunities to succeed, while those who committed crimes despite having an easy way to succeed without doing so may be more difficult, but I don't have any evidence to support that intuition. I don't have a good idea for how to rehabilitate a long-time scammer who demonstrates no guilt or even recognition of the harms she's caused and who had every opportunity to stop.

[Michael Wojcik]

The US fixation on incarceration (and our use of it as government-mandated, if often privatized, slavery) is a huge problem. Holmes is way, way down on my personal list of prisoners to feel concern for, though. She can get her turn after we release and compensate the huge population of non-violent drug offenders, for example.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the US school system needs to shift focus and not just churn out basically illiterate and innumerate kids.

[Claverhouse]

Just read an interesting paper by a Guy Padraic Hamilton-Smith,

The Agony & the Ecstasy of #MeToo: The Hidden Costs of Reliance on Carceral Politics

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3427857

Which whilst being about how the #MeToo movement dovetails into the expected tough-on-crime Cathago Delenda Est Bidenesque complex of American jurisprudence, it has several references to that country being ' arguably the most punitive nation on the planet.

[Anonymous Coward]

The US is a very strange place and doesn't seem to have a concept of civil and criminal crimes. Everything is criminal. There are cases of the police getting involved because someone's lawn was 'too long'. The US is the land of the petty tyrant.

[Plest]

One of the best statements on greed and apathy...

"Billions of dollars are invested every day into white-collar crime simply to ensure it's kept very boring."

[uccsoundman]

I'm astonished that she might be going to jail. SURELY there's some powerful person she can sleep with to get this conviction overturned, or at least keep her out of jail permanently. I don't have such power, but if I did, I'd love to make that trade.