That's nowhere close to my point, though, but sure. I understand the limitations of the argument. But consider the following.
If you're going to prosecute anybody who gave a bad mortgage or gave a mortgage in bad faith, then you're talking about a very large chunk, if not the overwhelming majority of the industry. That's impossible. I feel like it's safe to assume, too, that most of these people implicated in bad mortgages were not acting with malicious intent. Some of them are, but for the most part, it's a bunch of low-level lackeys relatively close to the bottom of a massive corporate hierarchy, enacting policies that come down from the top.
That being said, there are a handful of actors who are likely directly responsible for the foreclosure crisis, from the regulatory agencies that have proven to be lax at best and criminally negligent at worst (Thanks, Clinton and Bush II!), to management and executive staff who actually implemented a lot of these policies (Satan already has a suite prepared for Jamie Dimon), likely knowing full well what the consequences of their decisions would be. For instance, I guarantee you that mortgage lenders and servicers knew to expect a significant amount of default and built in the possibility of repossession and resale into whatever their projected gains would be...
It's really easy to sit behind a keyboard and say that several thousand people need to go to jail for decades, but it's much harder to actually build cases against the people who deserve to...
My other issue with the way that folks talk about this problem is that this a very bad case to screw up. Default is already a really serious issue and it's getting worse. The same companies that profited off of subprime mortgage default will profit off of student and payday loan default.
Setting bad precedent by failing to assign accountability where its due is arguably just as damaging as the crisis itself, and the left saying that everybody involved should be tarred and feathered - at the expense of actually leaning on its leadership to prosecute the people responsible (wasn't Obama supposed to do that for us?) - is hot air that gets us nowhere to actually doing something about the problem.