Even having a sentence dependent on "how much he cost his victims" is very wrong imho. The sentence should only depend on how violent the crime was, how much ef

Even having a sentence dependent on "how much he cost his victims" is very wrong imho. The sentence should only depend on how violent the crime was, how much effort was made to avoid being caught and how "malevolent" or carefully planned / premeditated it was. Maybe it should matter how much of the stolen money he actually spent (simply because money spent by a criminal tends to get into other criminals' hands and fuels crime by the process of being spent), or whether any company actually went out of business because of the losses, but even this stretches it quite a bit... The value of money is relative. Stealing $100M from a hedge fund or a bank could have very little impact on society as a whole. Doing an armed robbery for $1K on the other hand is actually very dangerous because things can get easily out of hand and innocent people can easily get killed. Now, whether the criminal stole the $100M by pointing a gun at someone's head or threatening to kill someone's family in exchange for some access codes, or he just "hacked" them, that tells you a lot about how dangerous the thief actually is to other people, what other crimes he would be capable of committing and whether he can actually be "rehabilitated" or not, and this is what the sentence should be based on. (Yeah, I know this is not how the the US legal system works, and I get that there are current advantages to the way it works now, mainly being good-enough at deterring large scale white-collar crime, but still, I think it's just plain wrong...)