ine years as a prosecutor taught me this: given time, people will get used to anything. A criminal proceeding can drag out for a year over dozens of appearances in court. Very quickly everyone involved grows strangely comfortable. The defendant will get used to being the defendant. He'll nod at the D.A. and say hello. He'll rise before the bailiff says to rise. He'll know which jailer (usually the sergeant) holds the keys to the cuffs. As the sergeant comes across the courtroom in the morning, the defendant will know why and, barely pausing in his chitchat with his lawyer, lift his hands together in the gesture of a begging dog. When outsiders attend trials, hoping for a glimpse of something true, they peek at the defendant and are often disappointed with the picture of a man who is totally relaxed, in fact a little bored with his own defendantness.

A better way to see the truth inside a prosecution is to be there at arraignments, post-arrest, when the thing is fresh. The judge speaks in a monotone: State your full name. . . . Sir/Ma'am, you are charged with a violation of. . . . Bail is set. Next.

When I was a young prosecutor, New York County ran arraignments deep into the night: burglars and prostitutes, token-sucking teens, druggies and gang members, a River Styx of disconnected rituals, oddly like a wedding chapel in Las Vegas. White-collar defendants were as rare as meteors in night court. They could be spotted long before the judge read the charges. The crooked lawyers, the triple-dipping city clerks, always looked rumpled in their suits and ties, slow-moving and bewildered, as if the lights in arraignments were too bright. (They weren't; they were bus-depot dim.) These defendants looked, in short, like people shaken out of a deep sleep and a happy dream.

Fraud is the happiest of dreams. It's a happy dream to say that I'll pad my expense account because the lousy office owes me anyway for all the gas mileage I've never been reimbursed for, and everybody does it, and nobody gets caught. One transaction breeds a practice of transactions and soon, with the helplessness of dreaming, you've embezzled a quarter-million dollars.

We've seen a lot of such helpless dreaming these days as one corporate scandal after another unfolds. When I left the D.A.'s office for the U.S. Attorney's office in New Jersey, I noticed a strange thing about business, crime and money. We like to think of fraud as stealing by deception, as taking without earning, as the opposite of true commercial virtue. But in the late 90's, as the market soared, the line between tough-minded business acumen on the one hand and lunatic, hubristic overreaching on the other seemed to be quite thin. Who's to say that some goal -- some ambition or idea -- is impossible, too gossamer and risky and, finally, too dreamlike? The fantastic was occurring all the time.

Ponder, for example, the improbable career of a former lowly Conoco salesman named Chuck Watson. In the mid-1980's, Watson helped create a company to trade in gas and power contracts. Watson's company -- driven, dynamic, energetic -- would be run by salesmen who, being equally dynamic, driven and energetic, were never really fond of the company's nondriven, nonenergetic name, which was U.S. Natural Gas Clearinghouse. In 1998, Watson changed the name to a perfect Joycean sound word of corporate neologism. Goodbye, Natural Gas Clearinghouse. Hello . . . Dynegy.

It might seem a bit silly, this love of faddish buzz and inch-deep management cliche -- except for one thing. By the year he changed the name, Chuck Watson had built Dynegy into a multi-billion-dollar corporation.

Dynegy's slogan was ''We believe in people.'' Many people working there idolized Chuck Watson and his downright dynegistic saga. One fellow in particular, a pudgy middle manager, had an especially inspiring biography. Born in Korea to a Korean mother and a G.I. father who abandoned the family, the young man came to Texas as a child. He lived in a shack in the wash of an often-flooded gully. At school, the other children beat him and made fun of him. But the lad was bright and resolute, and this is America, where every dream is possible. He went to college on full scholarship. He became a lawyer and a C.P.A. He married, had a child, and at the age of 36 enjoyed the corporate plumage of a throat-clearing title: senior director, Tax Planning and International.

His name is Jamie Olis. Two months ago, he was sentenced to 292 months (let's call it 25 years), one of the longest prison terms for fraud conspiracy in U.S. history.

f an arraignment is one place to see the truth about a prosecution, a second place would be the other end of the great and ceremonial intestine of the courts -- namely, sentencing. Sentencing is where the state can make a statement. We like to think the statement is about right and wrong, the certain bedrock of our values. This would be resonant and satisfying, a good end to the movie. But sentencing, in fact and practice, is a thing of fault lines, feeling versus theory, science against sympathy. We don't often get what we want from the drama of a sentencing, because we don't always know what it is that we want. More pain in punishment, like the record whack received by Jamie Olis, and those who'll follow Olis, will only put more pressure on these fault lines.

We are well into a season of C.E.O.'s on trial: Martha Stewart, L. Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco International, Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth, Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom, among many others. The biggest showdown of them all will probably come later this year, the United States against Jeffrey Skilling, the former chief executive of Enron. In legal circles, the Olis prosecution has been viewed as a dress rehearsal for the Skilling case. There are many parallels. In the late 90's, Dynegy was Burger King to Enron's McDonald's. As the recession deepened in 2001, both embarked on a nifty bit of fiscal inflation.

Dynegy's version of the Enronesque refinancing was known as Project Alpha. There is more than a whiff of office bathos in the details of the lame affair. We have the specter of executives agreeing to construct a major fraud and, being good corporate chipmunks, keeping a detailed record of their crime. Jamie Olis joined the chorus. ''Probably already know this,'' he e-mailed his boss, ''but huge issue to us so I'll nag. It is very important that we keep structure charts and other written information to an absolute minimum on this deal. Therefore, please do not forward the attached manual in its entirety to anyone else. . . . Finally, the charts should never, never, never go to anyone.''

O.K., O.K., we get it -- it's a fraud. Never, never, never tell anyone (cc: Mary).

Eventually, of course, the charts would go to everyone, reporters and shareholders, the S.E.C. and the F.B.I. Chuck Watson resigned. Three members of the Alpha team were indicted. Two were offered deals and could receive up to five years in prison. Only Jamie Olis went to trial.

''I take no pleasure in sentencing you to 292 months,'' the judge told Jamie Olis, ''but my job is to follow the law. Sometimes good people commit bad acts. I hope you will be able to salvage some of your life and some of your family's life.''

I take no pleasure, said the judge. If you were to spend a month hanging out at the courthouse, you would hear this speech, or something very similar, more often than you'd think. I heard it many times, sitting at the state's table, fingering my tie, waiting for a hammer to be dropped on a head across the courtroom. I heard it so many times that I actually began to listen to it, to wonder at its parts and its construction, rather in the way that you only really ''hear'' a Charlie Parker album the 40th time you listen to it.

I take no pleasure. Why would a judge feel the need to say this? Our culture insists on complete separation of pleasure and pain. We are, therefore, uncomfortable with the idea that Jamie Olis, once convicted, might go for punishment before a judge who smiled in his robes and said: ''Hmm, let me see, what will give me pleasure today? Hot pokers or the rack? A hundred years or mercy?'' This is the Caligulan mentality -- your pain is my prankish pleasure. As the face of the state it is one of our two or three deepest nightmares.

A key moral credential of punishment, then, is that it give no pleasure to the punisher, that it be carried out with a sort of dutiful remoteness or disinterest. This is surely the tone of most white-collar sentencings. In my time as a fed, I knew only one judge who took pleasure in sentencing. This judge was smart and very hard-working. He said he believed that male prosecutors should wear only white shirts. If you came in with a blue or, God forbid, a patterned shirt, you would be admonished from the bench. He didn't care what defense attorneys or female prosecutors wore in terms of shirts, which some women found a relief and others considered insulting. The fact that the judge had us all thinking about the meaning of shirts, and the rules about shirts, gives you some idea of the unique psychic force field that was the man's courtroom. When the judge rendered a sentence on an embezzling bank executive, you could see him up on the bench, going over the sentencing memo submitted by the defense, reviewing the various grounds for mercy:

Your Honor, my client has given generously to the Temple Beth Emmanuel. He is a Little League dad. Last month his wife lost a breast to cancer. He has never embezzled before and will never embezzle again. He is sorry, Judge. He is human, Judge. He is ruined, Judge.

I could see the judge reading down the paragraphs, his neck cords working. For him, each of these things was an advantage the banker had that a black kid from Newark's Fourth Ward didn't have. These kids were the krill of the system. Twenty years old, two carjacking raps, plus a handgun enhancement at sentencing -- any way you do the math, the judge was obliged by the law to send such kids to jail for, essentially, ever. I don't think this especially bothered him. But Mr. Embezzler, coming in with his wife in her black silk dress, and the sad, sad kids, and the appreciative letters from Little Leaguers, trying, through these things, to worm his way out of a scant year or two at a camp without fences -- this act, this ''worming out,'' this use of white-collar establishmentarianism to humanize and generate the perfume of sympathy, was physically repulsive to the judge. The only way to purge disgust was to blast Mr. Embezzler, to annihilate him in words, dress him down, rub his nose in his crime, then to max Mr. Embezzler under the guidelines (that is, to give him a year and a half, instead of a year), then to blast the defense attorney for having 16 typos in his sentencing memo. Disgust and anger were ebbing now, and with them, the pleasure of release. The judge would then remember to appear evenhanded. He would turn to me and find something in me that repulsed him as well.

Despite his solid sentences, prosecutors hated being ''wheeled out,'' or assigned, to his courtroom. We much preferred the gentler, more dignified, more scholarly judges. One judge was particularly beloved. He was literally courtly, the very picture of a judge. Born wealthy, this judge had never grubbed for money. Being a rational man, he proceeded cautiously when dealing with any phenomenon that he did not feel he understood. I think that is why this judge was a relatively timid sentencer, afraid to really ram a defendant.

I once had a securities fraud in front of him, a spectacular debacle involving millions of dollars in fake or inflated real estate projects that indirectly led to the failure of a big insurance company. One particular investigator, an old-school F.B.I. man, spent three years tracing every fax and phone call, every meeting, every letter, every wire transfer to the Caymans, recreating in his mind and on his office wall the great chrysanthemum of paper that is every complex fraud. The agent knew the judge's reputation as a cushy sentencer and said that he would consider it a victory if the defendant received at least three years -- one day in jail for every day the agent had spent in the mental jail of obsession with another person's crime.

The defendant was once a successful businessman. But he had been sucked up in a credit crunch and forced to desperate measures, and the whole thing had spiraled, as the dream of fraud will spiral, and now the man was on his way to jail. He'd been able to keep just enough money to pay for several excellent lawyers who had filed a sentencing memo, a plea and a play for sympathy, a portrait of a hateful man's humanity that was, in its way, as complex, as gripping, as twisted, as involved and as fundamentally fictional as anything by Dostoyevsky. There were many letters from bishops and sheriffs and Shriners -- the usual stuff. I wasn't worried.

But there was also an entire section in the defense presentation on the man's son, who was about 7. The defendant was a single father. He and the son were unusually close. The child was afflicted with a gruesome disease that required him, the memo claimed, to have his stool tested daily. For the tests to be accurate, they had to be performed immediately. Essentially then, the defense continued, every day the son defecated into his father's waiting, loving hands. Sending the father to prison would force the son to undergo this humiliation with a stranger.

Being a young man then, I didn't understand that a parent like the judge would find this image of headlong and total parental devotion completely human and persuasive, beyond all argument and words. I turned to the old agent and whispered something about the defense having no shame, dragging the kid into it. But the agent, the father of teenage soccer-playing daughters as I recall, watched the judge, saying nothing. The agent already knew that we wouldn't be getting our three years.

The agent went back to his office, leaving me with a question: was this justice? This is the bugaboo of right and wrong again. But in truth, sentencing is more often about wrong and wrong, relative crimes and comparative punishments, the sins of Jamie Olis (who got 25 years) versus those of his co-workers (who could get 5 years), the sins of Mr. Embezzler versus those of the kids from Newark. Everyone is equal and should be treated equally, yet everyone's unique, or so we think.

As Dickens once said, 'tis a muddle. As we prepare to ratchet up the ''war'' on corporate fraud with new shock-and-awe-type sentences, perhaps we should pause, or go slowly at least. Perhaps we should respect the muddle, the humane confusion underneath the act of punishing all criminals -- the violent and nonviolent alike. Nine years as a prosecutor taught me this: when we use force (here, a jail cell) without the calm of a theory, the result is rarely something we are proud of.