Fourth, a reasonable case could be made that legislatures
have tended to authorize (and judges to impose) less severe penalties
for white collar offenses than for equally or less serious
street crimes.49 Admittedly, comparing white collar and nonwhite
collar crimes in terms of seriousness is bound to be difficult.
Nevertheless, one cannot help but be struck by U.S. Sentencing
Commission statistics indicating that, during 2001, the
average sentence for white collar crime was just over 20 months,
while the average sentence for drug and violent crimes was 71.7
and 89.5 months, respectively.50 And there is plenty of anecdotal
evidence to the same effect; to cite just one example, in the late
1990s, officials of Archer Daniels Midland were caught redhanded
on videotape rigging prices of agricultural products with
competitors. The trial judge sentenced the two ringleaders to a
mere two years in prison each. An outraged appeals court
increased the sentence to the statutory maximum of three years.
Even so, as Kurt Eichenwald has put it, the result was that “executives
who effectively cheated every grocery store in the country
received shorter sentences than if they had robbed just one.”51