"Yeah. It’s the best way. Sending someone to prison is awesome, especially when they’re a criminal. So, that’s exactly where I think these guys are going and I think you guys just need to give John Durham a little more time…”
Did someone say prison? 😁
A heavily compromised system is not capable of mass punishment of the people that run that system. You may, if it serves the purposes of the puppet masters, be thrown an occasional sacrificial offering in the form of a scapegoat that is not longer useful to them or needs punishing to keep the others in line. If you want more than that you would need people to act outside the system, which is entirely possible because outside a handful of people with truly adequate dedicated protection, most everyone is a very soft target.
... yeah, that's why I said that given the system is completely compromised, punishment won't be dished out regardless of what nature it comes to, final or not
Your reason to prefer prison over something more appropriate to the level of scum being dealt with, is that you don't trust the system to deal such a punishment, my point is that we can't trust it to deal ANY punishment, specially to the creatures that helped them out.
If punishment comes, in any way shape or form, is because the system is taken over by "the good guys" as it were ("only way is the military" comes to mind), and in that case the final form of punishment is the only way to deal with this level of malfeasance.