NCJ Number
141094
Date Published
1993
Length
24 pages
Annotation
Corporate crime is organizational white-collar crime that enhances a company's capital accumulation and competitiveness and is often committed with the tacit approval of upper management, as opposed to occupational white-collar crime, such as embezzlement, which is committed by an individual for his own benefit and contrary to the interests of the corporation.
Abstract
Despite widespread recognition of the problem of corporate crime, many experts in the field remain reluctant to advocate full criminalization for corporate misdeeds. Instead of punishing individual corporate officers, many advocate noncriminal approaches or compliance strategies, in which corporations are encouraged to obey regulations in exchange for reduced fines. Other proposed techniques to reduce corporate crime include negative publicity, enforced self- regulation, and limited criminal and civil liability for managers. A fairly extreme approach is corporate probation, the externally or internally supervised restructuring of goals and decision-making within the organization. This author, however, believes there is an enormous gap in the relationship between the corporate criminal and the victim, which is not balanced by present sanctions or enforcement strategies. He calls for the imprisonment of responsible executives as a means of reducing the absolute power of the corporate class and, as a result, empowering community and grassroots organizations, unions, and consumer groups to challenge capitalist domination. 91 references