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Comment by _DeadFred_ | Hacker News Reader

Prison is a limitation of freedom of movement. The equivalent for a company should be the limiting of movement of shares (no shares bought/sold/traded) for the duration of an imposed sentence. Since corporations are people and all, there needs to be an equivalent punishment.

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They literally hire someone to be the head of the company, and pay them obscene amounts to set the company culture and policies but somehow they mostly avoid being responsible for bad company behaviour.

Prison for illegal behaviour should be applied to the C suite.

That just leads to the classic scheme of hiring a scrapegoat CEO, while in reality the company is being run by a person who technically holds a lesser title.

Once your company is known for hiring patsies the cost of hiring a CEO will naturally increase until it becomes unaffordable to continue its ways.

Distribute the jail time among the shareholders. That will get them to incentivize legality over profits REAL quick

You got a 401(k)? Then you have to serve jail time

Frankly, I'd just prefer really huge fines, preferably scaled as a percentage of either gross or net revenue or profit.

Unless that percentage was over 100% of the profit they'd still be making money from doing illegal things and the fines just become a cost of doing business.

Who said the fines had to be under 100% ?

Going that route instead of fines it should be a percentage of ownership made public. That:

1. Dilutes that shares, punishing the people who can effect the most change (shareholders) 2. Puts the government on the inside. With ownership, the government can then demand access/knowledge that they can't from a purely private company. And no company is going to want to deal with that headache if they don't have to.

That assumes that the state is punishing companies for criminalitythat it would also be a good idea to own. While that might sometimes be the case, it certainly isn't always the case.

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