She may have been United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017, filling prisons with the righteousness of a champion for justice, but she caught a new gig after being dismissed in the regime change as MSNBC commentator. Barbara McQuade managed to adapt to her new persona by finding new hated people to condemn in place of the ones she spent her career convicting.

Some people steal money with guns. Other people steal money with lies. In a court of law, they’re all crooks. But not all crooks are treated the same by the justice system, a fact Elizabeth Holmes may be counting on when it comes to her sentencing.

Crooks? Well, yes, considering that crooks covers a lot of ground with very little nuance, but it’s true that people who steal are crooks even if there are subtle distinctions that might make some conduct more dangerous and harmful in the process.

White-collar criminals like Holmes may not get their hands dirty in the traditional sense, but their conduct is no less criminal than a stickup in an alley. In fact, upper-class offenders like Holmes might be even more reprehensible; while street crime is often motivated by need, white-collar crime is usually motivated by greed.

This is the sort of sentencing argument a rookie prosecutor might make for lack of anything remotely intelligent to say. Of course, there are some thieves who steal to feed their hungry children, and that’s an argument to make in mitigation of sentence. Whether it’s “often” is a matter of debate, with few prosecutors neglecting to note that other people have hungry children and go to work rather than steal. Or that most hungry children don’t eat flat screen TVs or Air Jordans, or the drugs bought with the proceeds of knocking grandma to the ground while grabbing her purse. But I digress.

Perhaps because judges see offenders who look like them or who share similar backgrounds, they often bite on the argument that sentences for white-collar crimes should be something less than the guidelines range.  I have heard defense attorneys argue that their clients have already been punished enough through societal shame.  You can imagine one of these white-collar defendants lamenting to his lawyer that he can’t even walk through the country club dining room without getting a nasty look from a fellow member.

This is all a carceral progressive fantasy, a lie that the unduly passionate tell themselves to differentiate the defendants for whom they feel empathy from those they want to lock away forever. Cool snark with the country club bit too, after one Bernie caught 25 years and another 150.

But as one would hope McQuade knows, though you couldn’t tell from what she says, street crime isn’t prosecuted in federal courts, but financial crimes are, and the guidelines sentences based on the loss calculations bear no connection to the purposes of sentence under § 3553(a).

The effort to make this about judges going easy on defendants who “look like them” is particularly pernicious. There’s a bit of a difference in kind between a person who physically harms other people and someone who deceives putatively sophisticated silicon valley investors. This isn’t to argue that the forces that drive a person to commit crimes shouldn’t be taken into account or addressed, even if there isn’t much to be done about them in any individual case, but to bootstrap the fantasy of the poor oppressed gangbanger to justify demanding life plus cancer for a fallen waif is absurd.

Having tried to make the point that the left isn’t so much against incarceration, and surely has no love of due process for those they deem deplorable, McQuade makes it far better than I could, even if that wasn’t her intent.

As we think about ways to address racial and economic disparities in the criminal justice system, we should consider not only the disproportionately long sentences that are imposed on street criminals.  We should also consider the paltry ones that are meted out to the wealthy.

It’s not that the former federal prosecutors of MSNBC (they do so love their former federal prosecutors) want to get rid of prison cells. They just want to change the complexion of who sits in them until the end of times. It’s not that they’re against harshness, but only that the system be harsher on those they hate now rather than those they spent their career locking up.

H/T Doug Berman (and some very good comments there as well)