Asking America’s biggest bank to go two full years without committing a federal crime is like expecting Lindsay Lohan not to party.

But this is what the government’s deferred prosecution agreement with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. JPM, -0.21% , announced on Tuesday, actually does. Read more about the agreement.

This is a bank that can’t help itself. It has paid billions and billions to settle a string of civil fraud complaints in the past year — including a $13 billion deal for its dubious mortgage practices leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. On Tuesday, it settled a criminal complaint for its dealing with Bernie Madoff.

This bank is just too big avoid breaking the law. It has more than 260,000 employees and $2.4 trillion in assets.

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The law of large numbers says that at least some percentage of these people have personality disorders ranging from psychopathy and malignant narcissism to delusional thinking and substance abuse. The law of large numbers says someone in this too-big-to-jail enterprise is going to do something dishonest. And the law of large numbers says others in the bank will look the other way — particularly if there’s a bonus involved.

This is why J.P. Morgan’s vast sea of humanity looks calm one minute, and the next there’s a great “London Whale” breaching the surface with billions of dollars in surprise trading losses.

This is why Madoff was able to conduct his Ponzi scheme almost exclusively through J.P. Morgan and its predecessor banks.

To be fair, almost nobody, anywhere, did anything about Madoff until December 2008 when he finally got sick of trying to meet withdrawal demands from his clients and ratted himself out to the FBI to protect his family.

Many fine people and institutions, from regulators to some of Madoff’s own victims, willfully turned blind eyes to Madoff’s schemes. But here’s how one very telling conversation went down at J.P. Morgan on the day of Madoff’s arrest, according to a “statement of facts,” that the bank has agreed with federal prosecutors are true:

A J.P. Morgan due-diligence executive officer emailed a J.P. Morgan analyst: “Can’t say I’m surprised, can you?” The analyst replied: “No.”

J.P. Morgan agreed to pay $1.7 billion to settle felony charges that it ignored obvious red flags. The bank admitted to the charges but won’t be prosecuted if it lives up to a two-year deferred prosecution agreement.

It’s the classic corporate confession: Sure, a crime was committed but not by anyone in particular. No individuals were named. The bank put out a statement on Tuesday saying, yeah it “could have done a better job” but … “we do not believe that any J.P. Morgan Chase employee knowingly assisted Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.”

I can only laugh at such statements because my earliest lessons about banking came from Milburn Drysdale in “Beverly Hillbillies” reruns. Drysdale had frequent anxiety attacks that could only be relived by sniffing a stack of dollar bills. He would do anything to keep Jed Clampett’s money in his bank. For years I thought he was just a cynical TV caricature of a banker. But, no, bankers really do overlook the eccentricities of their clients if they deposit enough money.

Madoff claimed to have $65 billion under management before his criminal enterprise collapsed. Even accounting for the fraudulent inflation of that number, it’s enough to put a guy like Drysdale into a coma.

Someone at J.P. Morgan “consciously avoided and recklessly disregarded the truth,” said Anthony Accetta, who served as an assistant U.S. Attorney in New York in the 1970s and is now retired in Denver. “They kept their ears shut and their eyes shut, and that’s the same thing as knowing.”

Read more wisdom from Anthony Accetta in this previous Al Lewis column.

The official charges against J.P. Morgan, of course, only involve not filing a suspicious-activity report and not having adequate anti-money-laundering procedures in place.

It can be very difficult to pin these sorts of charges on any one individual, said Jordan Maglich, a Tampa, Fla., securities attorney and white-collar-crime expert.

“While employees may have voiced concerns, it was not their obligation to file a suspicious-activity report,” he said. “That obligation falls on the bank as an entity.”

Someone, however, must have made a decision not to file a suspicious-activity report and someone must be responsible for keeping anti-money-laundering practices in place. Maybe prosecutors didn’t do enough to find that someone.

“It’s a wonderful deal for J.P. Morgan,” said Andrew Stoltmann, a securities attorney in Chicago. “The fact that not one executive or supervisor got any penalty, financial or criminal, is absolutely stunning and disgraceful. I’m curious to see which federal regulator involved with this slap on the wrist joins J.P. Morgan’s legal department in the next six to 12 months. This is deterrence at its worst.”

The only problem for J.P. Morgan now could be getting through the next two years without committing a federal crime. But that may be no problem.

“They won’t go two years without committing a crime,” said Accetta. “They will go two years without committing a crime that will be prosecuted.”

We can only expect another round of turning blind eyes, said Stoltmann.

“The deferred prosecution agreement is a cop out,” he said. “It looks good on paper but the Department of Justice simply is unwilling to enforce them. … They allow banks to say they did nothing wrong, and they promise not to do it again.”

Reminds me of what Lohan told a judge in 2010 after violating terms of her probation: “I did the best I could.” Only she got sent to the clink. Too bad for her, she wasn’t a banker.

More from MarketWatch:

We’re at the mercy of J.P. Morgan

There are hundreds of Madoffs ripping people off

Time for another taxpayer-subsidized cheeseburger