Problematic and Faintly Promising Dynamics of Corporate Crime Enforcement, The (original) (raw)

Street Crime, Corporate Crime, and the Contingency of Criminal Liability

University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2001

This article describes how criminal liability is contingent on two sets of factors: (1) criminal law's alternatives?civil, administrative and even non-legal strategies for addressing wrongdoing, and (2) choices in how we acknowledge social influences, instrumental goals, and the social costs of punishment. Moral culpability is weighed against utilitarian concerns in decisions to impose criminal sanctions. Further, even the assessment of culpability itself is mediated by utilitarian concerns driven by criminal law's alternatives. Conduct that can be effectively addressed non-criminally seems less culpable (despite explicit coverage by criminal law), and that makes utilitarian concerns?and civil sanctions and remedies?more likely to prevail when balanced against the need for retributive judgment of wrongdoing. This dynamic arises because criminal law's long-standing twin rationales, retributivism and deterrence, sometimes conflict in the response they counsel for culpable wrongdoing. In practice, criminal liability is not explained by culpability, nor by the familiar grounds for prosecutorial discretion?state resources limits, first-offense status, or marginal resulting harm. Neither do these considerations explain the wide variance in its use across the landscape of crime, from white-collar to "street" settings. The way we actually employ criminal liability demonstrates the contingency of criminal law, and culpability itself, on civil alternatives and social costs, and this has distributive implications. We use criminal liability for "street" wrongdoing much more than we do for white-collar wrongdoing; that variation cannot be explained by distinctions in those two settings, sets of offenders, or feasible alternative remedies. Yet reasons for it explain why we have yet to move street crime policy in the productive direction that increasingly characterizes white collar policy.

On Theory and Action for Corporate Crime Control

Crime & Delinquency, 1982

The recent surge of governmental and scholarly interest in corporate crime seems likely to end or to slow down considerably under the Reagan administration. This paper examines six propositions jointly suggesting that corporate crime represents a more feasible and significant crime control target than traditional crime. It is argued that the discredited doctrines of crime control by public disgrace, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation can be successfully applied to corporate crime. This would be particularly true if the implications of our propositions were to form the basis for alterations in criminal law and criminal procedure.

The Conventional Problem with Corporate Sentencing (and One Unconventional Solution)

New Criminal Law Review, 2021

A recent wave of expressive accounts of corporate criminal law operate on the promise that corporate punishment can express a unique form of condemnation not capturable through civil enforcement. Unfortunately, the realities of corporate sentencing have thus far failed to make good on this expressive promise. Viewed in light of existing conventions that imbue meaning into our practices of punishment, corporate sentences rarely impose hard treatment in a manner or degree that these conventions seem to require. Accordingly, standard corporate sanctions turn out to be ill-suited to deliver—and, often, will likely undermine—the stigmatic punch upon which expressive defenses of corporate criminal law depend. A common response to this conventional problem with corporate sentencing has been to propose more, and harsher, corporate punishments. However, this approach overlooks the extent to which corporate punishment derives its stigmatic force from preexisting norms and conventions concerning individual punishment. If trying to improve corporate punishment, then, expressivists might instead seek either to leverage or to dismantle the underlying conventions that give existing sanctions meaning. An example of the former strategy would be to revitalize long-neglected proposals for corporate shaming by adopting a criminal convention currently absent from the corporate space—namely, the pervasive, stigmatic application of epithets like “thief” or “felon.” An example of the latter would be to join criminal justice reformers in targeting conventions that, in recent decades, have enabled increasingly draconian sentencing practices. On this view, dissolving corporate sentencing’s conventional problem may represent a further, incidental benefit of systemic criminal justice reform.

The Elusive Deterrence of Corporate Crime

Criminology and public policy, 2016

G iven the high manifest costs of corporate crime-to say nothing of its less apparent ones 1-it should be surprising how little we know scientifically (hence, confidently) about how best to deter or limit it. As an idea, the concept of deterrence is straightforward: Unwanted behaviors can be reduced in number if the costs of the acts are greater than their benefits, assuming that the decision maker is rational and the costs are imposed reliably and swiftly. And it has long been conventionally thought that corporate crimes should be among the most deterrable offenses because corporations are designed as quintessentially rational organizations built to pursue the highest gains (profits and market share) and to minimize their costs in the pursuit. Moreover, corporate executives should be especially sensitive to punishment threats from fear of losing their high status, income, and reputations. Although corporate behavior is certainly oriented to perceived risks and rewards, it is less sensitive to the law's conventional sanctioning threats than the classic model of deterrence would suggest (Simpson, 2002; Yeager, 2007), a point first detailed by the legal scholar Christopher Stone in his book, Where the Law Ends (1975). In that classic text, he outlined a central irony: The complexities of a corporate organization put more responsibility on the law to limit business crimes than it bears for conventional crimes, 2 while making it more difficult for the law to meet this burden (Yeager, 2016). I shall have more to say about this dynamic in the following pages.

Sanctioning corporate crime: How do business executives and the public compare?

American Journal of Criminal Justice, 1989

Previous literature on attitudes toward the punishment or seriousness of criminal behavior has largely neglected to focus systematically upon five issues: (1) public perceptions of corporate illegality rather than perceptions of street crime or other forms of white-collar lawlessness; (2) how evaluations are conditioned by the degree of culpability and harm an offense involves; (3) the circumstances under which citizens will support the use of legal sanctions against an individual executive as opposed to a corporate entity; (4) the public's willingness to support criminal as opposed to civil intervention into various kinds of illegal corporate activities; and (5) how business executives' atlJtudes toward corporate legal sanctioning compare to those held by the general public. Through a survey of residents and business executives in a midwestem metropolitan area, an attempt was made to shed light on these issues. The analysis revealed a pervasive willingness among the sample to embrace the use of civil sanctions against corporations regardless of the circumstances surrounding the conduct being rated. By contrast, advocacy of civil remedies against executives and criminal penaltms against either the corporation or its executives was found to vary considerably according to the culpability and harm manifested by a given illegal act. Also, public support for sanctioning corporate behavior was consistently higher than the support evidenced by executives, especially where the sanctions were directed at individual corporate managers.

Beyond Criminal Sanction and Negotiation: Public Governance as New Corporate Deterrence

There is significant debate over the best strategy for dealing with white collar offenders and corporate criminals. Some would argue that the best way forward involves better industry and corporate regulation while others argue that the problem is that punishments are too mild and lack stigma. Given the domination of neo-liberalism and some corporations are ‘too big to fail’, any innovative thoughts in crime prevention need to break the ice of such political and ideological power. Beyond state intervention, what the compliance school so far ignores is the role of public governance in corporate deterrence. This article argues that public governance could be a more effective preventive and deterrent mechanism for corporate or white-collar crime. The state should legally and financially empower individuals, communities, and non-governmental organisations in investigating and deterring corporations.

The Nexus between Criminology and the Corporate Sector: A Critical Overview

International Journal of Criminology and Sociology, 2024

The intricate interaction between criminology, company operations, and the regional and historical differences in criminal laws is examined in this study using a qualitative research methodology. This study compares how the criminal justice system handles corporate malfeasance to how it handles crimes committed by individuals in order to investigate the effectiveness and challenges of applying criminal law to enterprises. The majority of the data collected comes from secondary sources. The results show that managing corporate misconduct is different from managing individual transgressions, which creates challenges for enforcement and punishment. The results of the study show that the criminalisation of particular behaviors is significantly influenced by legal frameworks and social norms. The researchers came to the conclusion that improving corporate governance, strengthening enforcement protocols, passing laws protecting whistleblowers, and launching community education-based public awareness campaigns could all potentially increase the effectiveness of the criminal justice system in combating corporate crime.