More Enrons on the way

Remember Enron? Remember the 24-year prison sentence that was meant to discourage similar corporate malfeasance? Well, this past week, Jeff Skilling, Enron's former CEO and my former boss"who was convicted and sentenced to more than two decades behind bars in 2006"won a partial victory in an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. The appeal, however, is not likely to spring Skilling from his prison cell in Colorado. Even if he gets some convictions tossed, federal sentencing guidelines will probably keep him behind bars for at least another decade, given the size of Enron's multibillion-dollar financial collapse. But the appeal"and recent financial-reform push"has set me thinking, once again, about how we deter the next generation of corporate miscreants, especially now that a new financial-reform bill is making its way through Congress