I’m not endorsing the idea of prison time, but the short answer is: yes, of course there’s room, assuming we’re talking about C-suite level executives and maybe 1 or 2 hops below. That’s just a handful of potential prisoners and would be quite manageable.

US prisons house about 0.7% of the population, or about 1.4M people (depending on the source).

The US has about 200,000 CEOs. Not all CxO’s are crooks, but if they were, we could jail all the CEO’s and an average of 6 of each one’s direct reports using our existing prison infrastructure.

I’d wager the average criminal CxO does significantly more ongoing damage to society than the average person in US prisons would if released.

Our society does not try to solve high-level problems with prison, only low-level ones.

Steal $500 from your boss, you may get prison time. Your boss steals $500 from each of his employees through wage theft, and the worst he would face is being out some money from losing a civil labour lawsuit.

That's because most high level behaviour has an incredibly high bar that it needs to meet to be criminal, with a lot of subjective argument over intent.

The bar for low level crime is much easier to meet. Take something that doesn't belong to you? Hit your neighbour with a club? Ingest a taboo mind-altering chemical? All of those are crystal-meth-clear violations of the social contract.

Hundreds of people died. I agree that prisons are used way too much (especially relating to drugs, three strikes crap, fare dodging, crimes relating to poverty aka petty theft) - but gross negligence that leads to multiple deaths should warrant some prison time, if only to serve as an incentive for management to not cut corners.