I've never really understood why you can't put a company in jail. If a person can be removed from society and their ability to act freely can be removed, why can't you simply suspend their corporate charter for a period of time?
It would have to close all offices/manufacturing sites and fire all employees.
Suppliers and customers would have to be compensated, which would also probably result in lots of lawsuits.
It would mean bankruptcy for most companies out there.
Suspending is more or less equivalent to just shutting it down.
But yeah, a 2.5 billion fine is not much more than a slap on the wrist for a company with a revenue of 76 billion (2019).
So not much different than when a person is imprisoned. Good luck not getting fired and having debts rack up.
Such an existential threat seems like a very good way of scaring corporations into compliance (well, among other things).
Employees out of a job , suppliers losing contracts, customers never getting what they might have already paid for, creditors losing the debt, share holders lose all their investment.
Especially with a huge corporation like Boeing with 160k employees and billions flowing in and out, the effect would be huge.
Like I said, I agree there needs to be some way to punish, but just shutting it down would punish a lot of parties that aren't not responsible.
> Employees out of a job , suppliers losing contracts, customers never getting what they might have already paid for, creditors losing the debt, share holders lose all their investment.
This is what bankruptcy proceedings are for. A similar procedure can be made up for a "corporate death penalty".
>Especially with a huge corporation like Boeing with 160k employees and billions flowing in and out, the effect would be huge.
If the government was doing its job, corporations of this size should not even be allowed to exist for precisely the reasons you mention. But since anything goes in corporate America, here we are.
> Like I said, I agree there needs to be some way to punish, but just shutting it down would punish a lot of parties that aren't not responsible.
I would argue that people being indirectly hurt would be a good motivator (or reminder) for people being more picky who they do business with. If you don't learn your lesson the first time, then being burned multiple times will (hopefully) get the message across.
Perhaps forcing a new exectutive staff and/or board in some way, but don't see a literal state takeover ending well.
Oversight and managment/operations need to be separate. This mess happened partly because Boeing was given too much leeway in performing their own oversight.
If we create limited liability entities that can be criminally charged, they should be treated analogously to a person, or their corporate officers or owners should stand in the company's stead. Right now, corporations have an unprecedented ability to simply pay a large fine for a murder conviction. That is not an option for an individual convicted of murder.
Because...it's an abstraction that is not physically embodied and can't be imprisoned.
> a person can be removed from society and their ability to act freely can be removed, why can't you simply suspend their corporate charter for a period of time?
Suspending a corporate charter isn't equivalent to jail, it's equivalent to a reversible death penalty; the corporate charter is the source of legal existence of the corporation. Without a charter the corporation doesn't exist, can't be subject of legal action, can't own property, etc.
I'm not really convinced that that makes any sense as a punishment (or even that temporary impairment that would be more analogous to imprisonment would.)
People can be remediated by that kind of punishment, maybe, but abstractions like corporations probably cannot. Better to either dissolve them or exclude the bad individual actors from them and let them continue.
I do believe if we had any social imagination at all we could think of many many ways to materially punish bad actors. Like forcing a negative dividend, punishing/fining executives or board members personally, etc. People who own and control corporations need to have some skin in the game. Fines that are expended (or worse, appealed in court and subsequently never paid) are, evidently, too far removed.
The bigger and more important you are, the more people are affected by both you breaking the law and you being punished with imprisonment for doing so. A corporation is only different in scale.
I have seen a couple cases of someone punished for a white collar crime sent to jail, effectively a vacation, while his family suffers terribly.
They punished the wrong person and I feel it's a travesty.
Jail is not the right punishment for nonviolent offenses.