Sending people to prison for crimes they commit while being executives - imagine prison overcrowding if US do the same as Iceland - the country of 300K sent 29 bankers to prison as result of 2008 crisis. US is 1000 times bigger.
The sad answer is simply that prisons are a kind of security theatre. For that theatre to work, you have to appear to be imprisoning people that voters emotionally identify as threats,
Locking up street criminals, people of colour, and so forth fits in a world where the media and ruling politicians demonize them at every turn.
Locking up business executives doesn’t.
Oddly, repeating the sound-bites issued by "law and order" politicians does not magically persuade those of us who live outside of the conservative talk radio bubble.
Why bother having a justice system in the first place? Hell, why bother having a society at all...
Corrupted capitalism at its best!
How come when I systematically violate federal law regulators seem less willing to work with me to address these failures? Companies are not that big and mystifying. They are just made up of people and should be held accountable. Elizabeth committed felonies and some people almost certainly died as a result.