He’s not going to those kinds of prisons no matter what, if anything, he is convicted of.
White collar crimes done by rich people go to white collar prisons. If you or I did this on a smaller scale we would probably go to regular prison but not a billionaire.
The kind of prison he goes to will depend on the length of his sentence. Federal prisons have a reputation for being relatively tame, but this is only true at the minimum security level. Inmates with more than 10 years on their sentences cannot be placed at minimum security facilities, however.
The remainder of the security levels - low, medium, and high - are the the kinds of places you see in movies with all of the attending violence, sexual assaults, and generally nightmarish life.
In the federal system, sentences for fraud are based on amount of loss. For an $11 billion fraud, he would be sentenced to either life, or hundreds of years in prison - and there is no parole in the federal system. That length of sentence would require him to be kept at a high or medium security facility until his death - natural or otherwise - even though his crime was technically white collar.
Basically, if he is extradited to the US, he will never see the light of day, and will regularly experience every horror that the US prison system is rumored to have everyday for the rest of his life until he dies. So deciding to extradite him is a really big decision. It’s not just a slap on the wrist - it’s torture until he dies.
> For an $11 billion fraud, he would be sentenced to either life, or hundreds of years in prison
Well, none of the charges has a life sentence available, so that option is not possible. It does look like the statutory maximum for the offenses at issue combined is 280 years, but I haven't bothered to pull out the sentencing guidelines and see if, even, with $11 billion in frauds, that's likely without factors not obvious from the charges.
> and will regularly experience every horror that the US prison system is rumored to have everyday for the rest of his life until he dies.
Well, no, every rumored problem isn't real, and every real problem isn't experienced by every prisoner at all (much less daily.)
It does look like the statutory maximum for the offenses at issue combined is 280 years
Is that not effectively a life sentence without the possibility of parole? So the point of your response is to point out that he will not get life, but rather, up to 280 years?
Well, no, every rumored problem isn't real, and every real problem isn't experienced by every prisoner at all (much less daily.)
You're trying to argue that he might not experience every horror every day - just some of them, depending on the day? Rapes occur daily in prisons. He might not get raped every day, but he almost certainly will over 280 years in a high security prison (since you claim that is not a life sentence). The rape problem in US prisons is so bad that there is actually a law called PREA - the Prison Rape Elimination Act [1].
I see that pedantry is still alive and well among some on HN.
> Is that not effectively a life sentence without the possibility of parole?
The claim was that he would be sentenced to life or hundreds od years based on the charges and the amount in controversy. I was pointing out that while the second option may be at least theoretically possible, the first was not.
(Are the two practically equivalent? Sure, but the claim was that the charges would support either sentence, not that it would support a sentence materially ewut to life in prison.)
> You're trying to argue that he might not experience every horror every day - just some of them, depending on the day?
I’m pointing out that depending on which rumored horrors you consider, they might never occur in reality at all (rumor and fact arr different things), and even the ones that are factual horrors might never occur to the vast majority of prisoners, and even ones that are more common might never impact a particular prisoner and, yes, even the ones that happen to impact a particular prisoner often don’t do so daily, so the claim that he would be subjected to every rumored horror of US prisons every day of his sentence relies on so many levels of hyberbole as to be beyond absurd.
White collar crimes done by rich people go to white collar prisons. If you or I did this on a smaller scale we would probably go to regular prison but not a billionaire.