Two obvious questions dominate the many cases of malfeasance in corporations and markets that have arrived in the criminal justice system during the last five years: Was the behavior at issue criminal? If so, for how long (if it all) should the perpetrators be sent to prison? Thorough pursuit of either question involves challenging theoretical inquiries. On the second question (punishment), however, the law suffers at a facial level from an embarrassment. Extant criminal law has not come close to working out even the easiest parts of the question of how to punish financial reporting fraud. The United States legal system is botching things even as the courts routinely face decisions with grave consequences: Should the former chief executive officer of a Fortune 500 company, whose shareholders lost hundreds of millions when the company revealed falsity in its finances, be sent to prison for months, years, a decade or even life without parole?'My goal is to describe some concrete steps to rationalize the process of sentencing corporate offenders in the cases of large-scale financial reporting fraud that have been prevalent since 2001. Even if we set aside some heavy normative questions, such as the wisdom of imprisonment as a sanction for white-collar offenders, the proper mix of deterrent and retributive aims in such'cases, and the appropriate theoretical methodology for deriving the" optimal" or" just" sentence in a given case, at least three accessible problems remain. First, we need a scale for comparing one case to another. Second, we need a