Federal White Collar Sentencing in the United States – A Work in Progress

Abstract

Between 1980 and today, the US federal system has struggled to deal with the challenges of sentencing the relatively small number of defendants I shall loosely call “high-end” white collar offenders. After briefly sketching out this story, I explore the lessons, with particular attention to the interaction between institutional and procedural structures and theoretical white collar sanctioning goals. While the precise nature of these institutional and procedural structures is jurisdiction specific, I hope to highlight the need to consider such structures when devising an optimal (or, even second-best) sentencing regime.