To the contrary. I do find it a disingenuous argument to say "most of this kind of crime goes unpunished, so the cases we do punish, we have to punish for life".
The solution is not harder punishments for those that are punished, but punishing more of them.
Isn't that exactly how the criminal justice system works? Because you know you're not going to catch all the criminals you want the punishment to serve as a deterrent?
Punishing more of them is easily said, when the crime is much harder to prove than shoplifting for example. And I'm skipping the fact that the shoplifter will be represented by an overworked public defender while the exec has a team of lawyers lined up that probably are payed by the company that got richer off illegal behavior
Petty theft nets up to a year in jail, which is far more extreme than - relatively speaking - than handing out lifetime sentences for the damage being discussed here.
If the chances of getting caught are small, and the chances of being convicted are even smaller, should the punishment be harsher to have the same deterrent?
You do understand how the petty theft criminal represented by a public defender is at a disadvantage to the white collar criminal with an army of lawyers paid by the company?
"We should just catch more of them" is like saying we should just solve our energy problem by making nuclear fusion work. Sure, everyone agrees with that but that's just wishful thinking
No, it doesn't work. The US has been actively trying this in many states, so we have data on the relationship between deterrence effect and the likelihood*harshness of punishments - it turns out likelihood really controls the strength of the effect of deterrence. If you have extremely harsh punishments you DO incentivize doing a lot of damage to get away with it, and also incentivize repeat or exacerbated offending. (See: "might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb")
Uh you don't have data on that for white collar crime. If you do, please share.
Petty theft is done for different reasons to white collar crime. I agree with you that the punishment is not a deterrence for small offences.
I think there's a lot of deterrence coming from the Enron case where people actually went to jail. That's just too rare because you quickly get into questions of intent. And to prove intent is really hard.
Your note about 'proving intent is really hard' is kind of the underlying reason - white collar criminals tend to believe they will never be caught/convicted. So making sentences more severe for those who are caught and convicted doesn't actually impact those future criminals, because their calculations say there's no risk of it being applied to them.
The solution is not harder punishments for those that are punished, but punishing more of them.