Corporate Crime, Law, and Social Control

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.

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 Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2019

This article proposes a taxonomy to delineate different strategies defending the extension of an ostensibly moralized practice (the criminal law) to ostensibly non-moral agents (corporations). The proposal is to classify strategies for justifying corporate criminal law into three groups: (1) Economic theories reject the unique moral character of criminal law, treating corporate criminal liability as no different than any other type of enforcement regime; (2) moral agency theories identify characteristics necessary for praise and blame and then consider whether corporate agents are capable of satisfying them; and (3) political theories take the criminal law to be a uniquely moralized legal institution, but then deny that corporate criminal liability thereby requires an account of corporate moral responsibility. While the focus of this article is to trace the contours of this conceptual distinction, I offer some tentative reasons to think that the third category—political theories—has gone undertheorized but nevertheless offers the most promising avenue for an ultimate justification of corporate criminal law.

Contemporary Sociology, 1995

2011

Cast in eye-catching headlines, illuminated by the media glow, American crime captures the public imagination. From sex crimes to political corruption, from hate crimes to terrorism, the way people break the law shapes national identity. But this is not a new phenomenon, nor one limited to the present day. In his book Crime and the Rise of Modern America, Kristofer Allerfeldt studies the crimes, criminals, and law enforcement that contributed to a uniquely American system of crime and punishment from the end of the Civil War to the eve of World War II to understand how the rapidly-changing technology of transportation, media, and incarceration affected the criminal underworld. In eleven thematic chapters, Crime and the Rise of Modern America turns to the outlaws of the iconic West and the illegal distilleries of Prohibition, the turn-ofthe-century immigrants, and the conmen who preyed on the people of the Promised Land, to examine how crime and America both changed, defi ning each other.

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.

The Criminology of White-Collar Crime, 2009

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.