Egg mogul Jack DeCoster sickened 56,000 people. He’ll serve just three months in prison.

This all gets to the dirty secret of the American food system: Our regulators are overcommitted and underfunded, and inspections don’t happen the way they should. Still, even considering the lax regulatory environment, the DeCosters had to pull some strings to let things get that bad. The court found that that the company filed falsified paperwork to its distributor, U.S. Foods, which mandated an annual facility inspection and paperwork check. Then, when an AMS inspector found that shell eggs leaving the facility weren’t up to muster, DeCoster employees paid the auditor off with a $300 petty cash bribe. Moreover, the court found, employees routinely faked pack dates, selling eggs that were often days or even weeks older than they appeared.

These are flagrant violations, no doubt. Still, there’s a broader issue at play. It’s not just that a facility in Iowa sent out half a billion sketchy eggs one time, and our regulatory system missed it. Jack DeCoster is a serial corporate offender. Plants he’s owned in Iowa and Maine have been plagued with serious issues over the years, from allegations of unsafe working conditions and sexual abuse, to public health infractions and animal welfare concerns. It’s such a long, well-documented (though much of what was written about his offenses was pre-internet), and outrageous track record that, by 2010, Jack DeCoster arguably shouldn’t have been in business at all.

In a timeline for The Atlantic, I outlined the stunning number of lawsuits and violations racked up since 1949, when 16-year-old Jack DeCoster began to oversee a flock of 150 chickens on his family’s farm in Turner, Maine. It’s a long list, with criminal complaints dating back to the mid-1970s. The company was fined for doctoring log books, and, numerous times, for withholding pay from workers. There were allegations that child laborers operated hazardous equipment onsite. And out-of-control manure pits, fly infestations, and appalling smells spawned countless lawsuits. Twenty-seven residents of Turner, Maine filed a $5 million suit alleging that beetles—trucked in by the company to control fly problems—overran the town in biblical proportions. Former Maine District Attorney James Tierney, who had numerous run-ins with DeCoster during his tenure, told me a number of disturbing stories—including an incident when, after 100,000 laying hens were killed in a barn fire, company employees allegedly used a backhoe to dig a huge pit, burying the corpses in a reeking mass grave.

In 1995, the state of Maine won a civil suit alleging that DeCoster Egg Farms kept workers in broken-down, company-owned trailer homes, without adequate water, using intimidation and physical barriers to bar employees from speaking to legal counsel. In 1996, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) levied an $80,000 fine after a man died in an explosion while welding inside a DeCoster-owned feed mill; the facility contained high volumes of dust, and the agency felt the victim was not adequately warned by his employer. That incident may have paved the way to the historic, $3.6 million fine OSHA imposed later that year for “egregious and willful violations of health and safety and wage and hour laws,” including exposed electrical wiring, exposing workers to industrial contaminants, not properly reporting workplace injuries, and refusing to offer prompt medical treatment.

The company ultimately paid $2 million, but even that wasn’t enough to improve the company culture. In 2002, DeCoster Farms settled in a suit brought by 11 female employees who alleged they were raped or otherwise coerced into having sex with their male supervisors at DeCoster-owned Wright County Egg. No criminal charges were filed, but the settlement was $1.5 million.

This is all just skimming the surface—my complete timeline has many more examples. But the question remains: How could a company saddled with decades of not just allegations and settlements but government citations, and record-breaking fines, and even convictions, survive for so many years?

The answer is despairingly simple. You can make a lot of money factory farming eggs. The money DeCoster’s egg businesses paid over the years—well over $10 million—just wasn’t enough to slow the rapid pace of growth. It’s almost like he could afford to factor out punitive damages as just another cost of doing business.

Until the very end, Jack and Peter DeCoster claimed they did not know about the unsanitary conditions that led to the recall. They argued that they shouldn’t be held criminally responsible, in the words of Judge Bennett, “based upon the fact that someone else subordinate to the defendant broke the law.” For the court, that just wasn’t good enough. In food and drug law, guilty intent—as Judge Bennett takes great pains to point out in his decision, citing years of legal precedent—is not necessary to bring a conviction. In other words, even if the DeCosters didn’t know what was going on under their noses, they should have.

Which brings us back to last week’s news. This is a case of two executives who faced everything over the years—lawsuits, fines, horrible press. Everything, that is, except jail time. And that’s important. When it comes to high-level corporate crimes, the prospect of serving time may be the best deterrent our society can exercise. Financial penalities, workplace violations, outraged news coverage can just be absorbed. But not so much the shame and public disgrace of conviction, the life disruption of a stint behind bars, the horror and monotony of losing one’s personal freedoms, temporarily or not.

When the regulatory system fails the public, and when companies make too much money to be threatened financially, the personal, legal culpability of executives is all we can count on. Let’s hope these two three-month prison sentences will be enough to convince the company to clean up its act, finally bringing the DeCosters’ long legal saga to a close.