What Works? A systemic review of corporate crime deterrence

SEIN Social Impacts of Business eJournal, 1997

Sentencing Commission. Commissioner Goldsmith acknowledges the assistance of his law clerk, Patrick Tanner, who provided important logistical support during the final phase of this project, and former Commission Counsel Win Swenson, who reviewed the manuscript and provided constructive commentary. Commisioner Goldsmith also expresses his profound appreciation to Dr. Mark Reichman, who successfully repaired the Author's ruptured cerebral aneurysm in 1993. Commissioner Goldsmith further acknowledges that any shortcomings in this Article reflect his own pre-existing deficits rather than Dr. Reichman's handiwork.

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.

Corporate Compliance on a Global Scale. Legitimacy and Effectiveness, 2022

This chapter focuses on the relevance that corporate remediation, as fostered by the compliance paradigm, has in the sanctioning of corporate crime. The phenomenon of remediation can be considered to be a consequence of the interaction between compliance and corporate criminal law: on the one hand, the origins of compliance from within the field of regulatory law are mirrored in its aim to stimulate law-abiding behavior within companies even after illicit conduct occurs—by compensating victims, the restoration of damage, and implementing internal compliance systems to avoid the same crime happening again in the future. On the other hand, the “criminalization process” undergone by compliance has had an impact on its voluntary dimension. In some cases, public authorities impose compliance mandates on corporations as a condition of their continuing their activity. With settlements, criminal prosecution and conviction are used as threats to push companies toward adopting compliance measures, and external monitors can be appointed to oversee the compliance mandates. Settlements and monitorship then represent a privileged standpoint for investigating corporate remediation and its positive impact on the principle of culpable liability for corporations. The topic of corporate remediation indeed offers us an opportunity to consider the diachronic nature of corporate activity and provides a framework for modeling corporate punishment according to the “personality” of companies.

2004

We combine prior research on ethical decision-making in organizations with a rational choice theory of corporate crime from criminology to develop a model of corporate offending that is tested with a sample of U.S. managers. Despite demands for increased sentencing of corporate offenders, we find that the threat of formal sanctions does not directly affect the likelihood of misconduct. Managers’ evaluations of the ethics of the act have a significant effect, as do outcome expectancies that result from being associated with the misconduct but not facing formal sanctions. The threat of formal sanctions appears to operate indirectly, influencing ethical evaluations and outcome expectancies. There is also support for the influence of obedience to authority, with managers more likely to engage in misconduct if ordered to do so by a supervisor.

Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Law and Contemporary Problems, 1997

Ohio St. J. Crim. L., 2003

In this article, Professor Brown examines some distinctive problems presented by corporate crime enforcement that, on their face, seem troubling but that considered in context, he suggests, may actually have desirable effects. Professor Brown begins by noting that while most of constitutional criminal procedure addresses concerns of excessive governmental power, white-collar corporate offenders are less at risk. In contrast to street-crime defendants, they have ample access to counsel and a variety of means to resist government enforcement strategies. The article describes a range of practical barriers that make corporate crime harder to detect, investigate and prosecute and that, because of the wider range of regulatory possibilities (including civil enforcement), create opportunities for manipulation by corporate offenders. Professor Brown suggests, however, that these seeming difficulties actually provide a desirable counterbalance (albeit imperfectly and largely by coincidence) to a distinctive American preference for excessive use of criminal law to address wrongdoing and social harm. The article concludes that, while risks remain of both excessive government punitiveness on the one hand and excessive influence by corporate offenders to achieve undue leniency on the other, the practical barriers to corporate crime enforcement have the potential to moderate the government's pattern of populist-punitive enforcement in ways that could lead to improvements across the criminal justice enforcement spectrum.