It’s really hard to write a book, but a punishment it ain’t.

For some ridiculous reason a judged decided yesterday that a pharmaceutical executive who pleaded guilty to making false statements to the feds didn’t have to go to jail. The judge thought there was a harsher sentence — “write a book oh corrupt executive.”

This from Bloomberg News:

Andrew Bodnar, a former senior executive vice president at Bristol-Myers, was given two years’ probation by U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina in Washington and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine. As part of his probation, Bodnar must write the story about how he came to be convicted of the misdemeanor.

Bodnar pleaded guilty in April to a single count of lying to the Federal Trade Commission to conceal a secret agreement with Toronto-based Apotex Inc. to forestall competition. Plavix, used by 48 million people every day in the U.S., generates more than $8 billion in global sales split between New York-based Bristol-Myers and Paris-based partner Sanofi-Aventis SA.

Bristol-Myers was willing to promise not to undercut Apotex sales if the generic-drug manufacturer agreed to delay entry into the market of its version of Plavix until just months before a patent on the medicine expired in November 2011. The FTC objected, saying Bristol was in effect paying Apotex to stay out of the market for longer than it would otherwise.

Am I in the Twilight Zone or something? This is exactly why executives have run amok and allowed the greed-o-meter to take over. There are few if any ramifications for doing everything you can to line your own pocket at the expense of employees, shareholders and, it turns out, the economy at large.

By conspiring to keep a generic version of the blood thinning drug from coming to market, it was out of the hands of hundreds, maybe thousands of people who couldn’t afford the high price. This impacted people’s lives.

In my work covering labor for more than two decades I’ve seen rank and file employees go to the slammer for a lot less. One lowly worker got jail time for sabotaging a company’s computer system and keeping the executives from accessing their emails. And many employees have been incarcerated for stealing stuff on the job.

I’m not condoning their behavior, but this be-an-author sentence exposes a disturbing double standard.

In sentencing Bodnar, Judge Urbina said:

“I would like to see you write a book” so other people “don’t find themselves in a similar situation. Who knows, it may even be inspirational.”

I don’t know about you, but the only thing a book by Bodnar would inspire in me is disgust.

No word on whether Bodnar would be able to keep the millions such a book would likely fetch.