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

Science, values and politics: an insider’s reflections on corporate crime research

“…Thus, culpability is 25 "Recognizing structural pressures on conduct sharply changes enforcement strategies. It prompts legal responses to wrongdoing that reduce the opportunity for crime; we change the actor's context to make crime less possible….Offenders, or merely anyone engaged in a given activity, may have to report their conduct, be it environmental discharge of waste or financial transactions….These sorts of legal responses, common in regulatory law and arising from deterrence frameworks, focus little on blame and much on reducing opportunities for recurrence of offending" ( [7]: 1338). 26 Cf., Laufer [25], whose detailed criticism of corporate criminal liability suggests that corporations use the same corporate complexity that underlies the doctrine to challenge the imposition of this form of liability on corporations.…”

“…Where law provides for non-criminal legal alternatives to the criminal prosecution of corporations, as it typically does with civil and administrative law options, enforcement officials are likely to prefer those alternatives to the prosecution option. They are typically preferred because they can often achieve the same preventative effects as the criminal option, but with lower costs to the state (because non-criminal sanctions generate less resistance from powerful corporate adversaries that might in the end defeat prosecutors in criminal court) and with fewer risks of spillover costs to innocent third parties (e.g., to a criminally guilty corporation's customers and employees that large fines and/or damaged corporate reputations might bring) [7]. 25,26 Brown's analysis leads to a number of important conclusions.…”

“…corporation while working within the scope of their employment. In his close analysis of the doctrine and its effects, Brown [7] emphasizes that it "acknowledges that responsibility, in some settings at least, is not fully captured by the model of individual moral agency that underlies traditional criminal law. "…”

“…7 In the preface the translator wrote [translated from the Chinese]: "China and the U.S. have different social [meaning political] systems, and there are big differences in the commission of crimes by legal entities [corporations], the reasons behind this, and relevant policies. Nevertheless, the commission of crimes by legal entities, as a product of the development to a certain historical level of China's market economy, has quite a few things in common [with the American case], which are worth our attention as a comparative case.…”

“…The translator's preface noted that it was important for the Chinese to understand the problems of corporate malfeasance and its control as that nation was converting from a command economy to one based increasingly upon competitive markets and privatized production. 7 Looking for lawbreaking: piercing the government's veil In designing the research in the 1970s that led to Corporate Crime, our intention was to establish systematically the largest database ever constructed on major American corporations' violations of federal laws. 8 The plan was to interrogate these data statistically to determine patterns of offending, to identify the structural and economic correlates of these patterns, and to discover patterns in government sanctioning of these offenses.…”