I’m not expressing sympathy for financial or white-collar criminals. They deserve lots of scorn and punishment, including more criminal convictions, fines, restitution, court orders, and court oversight than they typically get. My position is not what you seem to think it is, which would indeed be an extreme position.

I just don’t equate punishment with prison. I realize that the best kind of punishment isn’t always having the taxpayers pay for years of that person’s food and lodging, depriving their innocent relatives and colleagues of the emotional/family presence and professional labor/earnings of someone who may have been very noncriminally important to them in many ways outside of prison, introducing them to the many gangs and violent criminals that populate US prisons while simultaneously subjecting them to a traumatic change in life circumstances, turning them into low-paid involuntary workers for wealthy capitalists to profit from as is done in many privately run prisons pursuant to the exception in the Thirteenth Amendment, and so on.

Nothing I said is true only for the financial or white-collar criminal. In particular, poor brown or Black drug users are way over-imprisoned and that shouldn’t happen either. I’d actually rather harsher punishments for the financial white-collar criminal than for the poor minority drug addicted, but in most cases neither should involve prison.

Prison is clearly necessary in some cases and arguably necessary in others, but it shouldn’t be our first thought of how to punish a criminal - whether white-collar or blue-collar - especially not the way typical US prisons work.