You ever notice how the government likes to treat corporations like people, but corporations never go to prison? They get fined a marginal fraction of their yearly profits, or maybe in an extreme case an employee goes to jail, but the corporation continues to do what it was doing before. Basically, if you're incorporated, and you can find a fall guy, nothing can stop you - except maybe a drop in sales.
Corporate death penalty - dissolution of the corporation - is an easy concept (even if used far too infrequently). But I wonder what would be corporate equivalent of prison time? For individuals, incarceration is about limiting their usual freedoms. So how could it work for a corporate entity? A temporary suspension of the legal person status?
Corporate "jail time" would be indistinguishable from "death penalty" in practice: suspending a corporation's ability to engage in contracts and do business basically means the corporation rapidly falls apart, existing contracts run out or get cancelled, employees don't receive pay checks, etc.
Corporations are basically a sizable chunk of the privileges people lose when going to prison but without the physical reality that guarantees a continued existence. In practice that physical reality manifests itself in the form of the actual human beings running the company and making its decisions, obviously.
So considering a corporation is more like a person without direct agency that relies on the care and supervision of trusted persons, it seems obvious misbehaviour of corporations should be treated as criminal negligence on the part of its caretakers, the people running it.
Alternatively the people running it are the corporation's physical manifestation and therefore the ones who should go to prison if the corporation is jailed (like how when a natural person is sent to prison, they are physically imprisoned rather than merely having their bank accounts frozen).
But all this navelgazing aside, the US is a country where civil assets can be arrested as suspected accomplices to crimes without bringing up any charges against their owners (civil forfeiture). It's clear the "corporations are people" narrative only exists to let certain people have their cake and eat it too, not to make any sense if taken literally.
> Corporate "jail time" would be indistinguishable from "death penalty" in practice: suspending a corporation's ability to engage in contracts and do business basically means the corporation rapidly falls apart, existing contracts run out or get cancelled, employees don't receive pay checks, etc.
How is this different from when a person goes to jail? They loose their job, house, many future chances for a job. We just don't kill people when they're unprofitable.
Personal insolvency generally doesn't kill the person. Corporate insolvency typically results in the corporation being dissolved, effectively killing it.
I'm not arguing that this is a bad thing. If anything I'm arguing that corporations shouldn't be granted people privileges because they are demonstrably not people. And that if the corporation misbehaves that means people need to be held liable, too.
Indicting a corporation (which is rare) is considered a "death sentence". Most other companies will not sign contracts with another company that has been Indicted (even if not convicted).
> A temporary suspension of the legal person status?
That's a start. A stronger limitation of their usual freedoms could also be modeled on the Voting Rights Act's preclearance[1] requirements. The corporation has the burden of proving to an independent regulatory panel that a proposed change will not have the effect of recreating the problem.
> But I wonder what would be corporate equivalent of prison time?
How about just prison time ? Corporations on their own can't do anything, they are just a legal fiction. The actual decisions are made and implemented by real human beings; they can be held responsible and put in jail.
The executives should be held personally responsible for what the corporation does. In this case, people died so the CEO, CFO, etc. should all be sent to jail as if they had killed these people personally, their assets seized and distributed to the victims. I guarantee you that once you have real consequences for executives' actions, they will fix the problem immediately. That will never happen in our corporation first culture, however, but the culture might eventually change and demand justice. Stranger things have happened.
Putting a corporation 'in jail' is essentially a death sentence, since no corporation is realistically going to survive that process. That would have lasting, negative repercussions for people who have committed not crime beyond being employed by someone who did.
I completely agree that more robust methods for punishing criminal corporate acts are required, but those can take many other forms – and I'd personally side with individual responsibility for illegal actions.
I'm not against personally prosecuting those in charge, but it's often extremely difficult to prove that specific individuals are responsible.
There is a simpler solution. Impose bigger fines. Much much bigger fines. Make the cost/benefit calculus for breaking rules so unattractive that the prudent business decision is to not break them.
Right now, when these companies are caught, they have to pay back what they stole, and sometimes get hit with a not so bad punitive damage. They should instead be hit with damages so hard that it kills their stock price, and does serious damage to the company itself. It will make the people in charge more careful.
> I'm not against personally prosecuting those in charge, but it's often extremely difficult to prove that specific individuals are responsible.
But isn't that the whole reason CEO's get paid so much, because they carry so much responsibility ? Most corporations have a clear chain of command, should be quite easy to figure out who is responsible (which can be separate from who actually committed the crime).
No, but they use it as a justification for their ridiculous salaries so I’d say we take them up on it and hold them personally responsible for their company’s crimes.
The threat of corporations going to jail would be a great disincentive for them growing too large. I think we would be much better off if we had more smaller companies.
