[computronus]

Sticking with the analogy, there are still others who suffer while one person is punished with jail time or otherwise. If the single earner in a household is locked up, their family suffers in many ways. If they happen to run a business, their business and employees suffer too. And none of them did anything wrong.

The problem is with the scale of punishing an entire company, though. There's a lot of fallout from that, it's true. So the punishment would need to be fair, limiting the offending entity as a whole without unduly harming innocent employees. This could be where the analogy breaks down (which argues towards how unfair the personhood of corporations is, if there's no good recourse for wrongdoing).

As for a chilling effect ... yeah, that's the idea. Employees in a company would be very much more interested in staying on the right side of the law because of the heightened risk to, well, everybody.

I'm reminded of businesses that need to stay accredited, or licensed, or otherwise in legal compliance with something in order to function at all. If one errs enough (criminally, say), it loses that blessing, and could end up folding, and all the innocent employees are out of a job.