One of the principles of tort law is that the penalty should account for the likelihood of getting caught. If your nuclear power plant melts down, punitive dama

One of the principles of tort law is that the penalty should account for the likelihood of getting caught. If your nuclear power plant melts down, punitive damages will be low, since there's no way you could have ever covered it up, and the plant will typically pay mostly compensatory damages for direct harms. For a tort where you expect that thousands of people have done it without getting caught, the punitive damages are very high so that the overall calculus for a prospective criminal becomes net negative expected value. That's not a principle of criminal law in the US but often becomes part of the sentence extrajudicially.