[arrosenberg]

> This obviously has negative externalities, because while a corporation is easy to fine, it's hard to put in prison... but trying to approach it differently would be about as fun as modeling a CPU as a bunch of transistors.

There's nothing stopping the legislature (other than their own self-interest) from passing a law that executives and board members are criminally liable for the malfeasance of their entity. We already apply that logic to positions like a medical lab director.

[jojomodding]

This is already the case. Or rather, a corporation can not (e.g.) commit murder or theft because that usually requires some physical action. That physical action will be performed by a human, who can then be found guilty. If he was ordered to do so by (e.g.) the board, the board will be held as accessory to the crime and cam also be found guilty.

The problem is just that the board can usually claim they did not know, and that they have deep pockets to afford good attorneys. To get around the first thing, you have strict liability laws.

Strict liability laws, though, are how you end up with the situation where barkeepers are criminally liable for selling alcohol to underage people, even if they could not have known the buyer was underage (and that's about the only instance of strict liability in criminal law). I personally find this very unjust and would rather that strict liability was not part of criminal law.

[PopAlongKid]

> a corporation can not (e.g.) commit murder or theft because that usually requires some physical action.

Not true. Consider investor-owned utility PG&E in northern California.

"While on probation [for previous felonies], PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter for a 2018 wildfire that wiped out the town of Paradise, about 170 miles (275 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco."

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/24/1075267222/californias-embatt...

[arrosenberg]

If they know about malfeasance and don't stop it, they are complicit; if they don't know about it, they are grossly negligent. In either case, they should be held accountable for the crimes. Maybe in an ideal world it would not be that way, but since we are seeing corruption run amok in corporate board rooms, it's clear they need a greater incentive to police their organizations.

[anon291]

The are already liable and have always been liable if it can be shown they had knowledge of it. The logic is already applied. Corporations are not people, but they are legal persons. For some reason, using language that sounds the same makes people confused and causes a large section of society to get irrationally angry.

[wahnfrieden]

It's always possible to think up new rules that solve social issues. The challenge is seeing how such rules would ever robustly come into place. In your example, medical lab directors have no lobbying power and less dramatically profitable upside to their activities.

[arrosenberg]

That's exactly my point. It's not hard to figure out how to "put a corporation into prison", the issue is that we've been trained to accept corruption as a normal facet of corporate personhood.

[usrusr]

And yet the owners for the benefit of whom those high ranking employees have committed their crimes run free, keeping the spoils. Not even "spoils except for some monetary punishment" is they sold at the right time. Imprisoning CEOs solves depressingly little.