Bernie Madoff Sentenced to 150 Years in Prison

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Why do we sentence people to more than fifty or so years in prison even though everyone knows there is no way they can serve out the full sentence?

Because that's the amount of years that his crimes add up to? Madoff would be unlikely to live through even a 20-year sentence, so should it have been capped at some point?

Regardless of whether 150 years are really realistic.....it has the same effect: this man won't be free in his life again.

That's justice.

in a perverted Western sense, sure it is, though it doesn't and won't make anybody's life any better.

Him also being forced to forfeit $170 billion will.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Why do we sentence people to more than fifty or so years in prison even though everyone knows there is no way they can serve out the full sentence?

Because that's the amount of years that his crimes add up to? Madoff would be unlikely to live through even a 20-year sentence, so should it have been capped at some point?

Is explicitly sentencing someone to life imprisonment (as opposed to a set number of years that add up to the same thing) so hard? 

This is a minor quibble of mine, but it just irritates me to have judges and/or juries sentence someone to centuries in prison when they could have just said that they would be in prison for the rest of their lives.  It makes the punishment sound more ridiculous than it should. 

Yes because it's legally impossible. Madoff did not committ any one crime that is eligible for a life sentence. The sum of the sentences for all the crimes he did commit certainly add up to higher than a life sentence, but that's beside the point.

BTW in some countries (I know Spain is one) sentencing people to jail for over a century is actually standard practice because no life sentence exists, basically any murder sentence that would carry life in the US would instead get >100 years in Spain.