Joe Nocera, Columnist

Just How Is a Year in Prison Fair for White-Collar Crime?

Enron’s disgraced CEO ended up with a 14-year sentence. Executives in the Valeant scam got a year. What gives?

November 2, 2018 at 4:16 PM UTC

Joe Nocera is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. He is the host and writer of the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast "The Shrink Next Door."

There’s no outrage over a flow chart.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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A few months ago, Jeffrey Skilling finally got out of jail, moving from a minimum security prison in Alabama to a halfway house in Houston.

If you’ve forgotten about Skilling, you can certainly be forgiven; it’s been a long time since he was one of the kingpins of corporate America. In the 1990s, as the president and then the chief executive of Enron, he was widely portrayed as the brains behind the energy-trading company that was one of the avatars of the new economy. Among many other accolades, Enron was named “America’s Most Innovative Company” by Fortune magazine for six years running.