Do you think an increase in punishment the executives expected would have led to the problems for subpostmasters being resolved faster or slower?
Having rich people face actual material consequences to their life, rather than "punishments" like losing a job or honor, would hopefully reduce corporate malpractice, yes, as they now know that they are not invincible (obligatory note that I am talking about criminal responsibility, not suggesting we do away with LLCs or something)
I think to achieve that it has to be better in expectancy for someone who knows about the problem (and widely believed by that person too) to act sooner to resolve the problem than to try to cover things up, but I don’t really know what rules would help. For example, maybe an alternative thing that would work would be some kind of whistleblower rules like in finance[1].
In the hypothetical where I am stood with my hand on the lever choosing between stopping the scandal sooner and letting executives off entirely or having more wrongful convictions for longer but later throwing the executives in jail, I will choose the former every time, even though it feels unjust.
[1] In finance the whistleblower rules are designed to incentivise people to not be accomplices to crimes done by their superiors/coworkers. The incentives must be high because, no matter what the rules say about it, whistleblowers will expect to not work in finance again after blowing the whistle. The rules work because those large-scale financial crimes generally are hard to without one’s competent colleagues finding out.
A well designed system, whether a computer or an organization should always have controls that guide things to where they should be. That means carrots and sticks.
In a place like a post office, that means separation of duties, audit, and clear lines of accountability. Things fail when nobody asks awkward questions or looks.
I do think that leadership responsible for a debacle like this must be punished. Their incompetence destroyed lives of innocent people.
The problem here was that as many sub-postmasters were co owned by a husband and wife with children. There was an enormous incentive for one of the sub post masters to plead guilty and say, "my wife had nothing to do with it." Doubly so as the sentences would often be on the cusp of the "suspendible range", a guilty plea combined with contrition is much more likely to get a judge to suspend your sentence if he can.
Of course, this "plea-bargaining" is standard practice in the states but we aren't used to it in the UK.
The issue is that no barrister would allow their client to plead guilty without giving them a little canned speech about not pleading guilty if they didn't do it and having them, "sign their brief".