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Your claim sounds good the way you put it, but less so when you consider that retributive justice seems ineffectual at deterring violent crime... unless you're

Your claim sounds good the way you put it, but less so when you consider that retributive justice seems ineffectual at deterring violent crime... unless you're also going to claim that shitty companies are generally smarter than felons.

nerdponx 9y ago
The analogy does not work. People commit violent crimes for very different reasons than shitty companies commit economic crimes. And at the end of the day, there is some amount of basic deterrence for people who are not in some kind of adverse mental state. How many more crimes of passion would there be if murder, or assault, were not so harshly penalized? The “deterrence does not work“ line as a matter of degrees, not absolutes, and only applies to a subset of the population. For the rest of us, it works just fine. So to re-join the topic at hand, think of it this way: there will always be outright criminal corporate actors, and deterrence by corporate death will never stop them. These are the Bernie Madoffs and Jeffrey Skillings of the world. Their corporate actors, however, only act the way they do because they are simply are no consequences for doing otherwise, and upper management has evidently quashed their consciences entirely: AT&T (selling deanonymized data with token, non-retractable consent), BP (Gulf oil spill), Equifax (not caring about your security). Lest we forget that these businesses are in the business of making money, and they do so with terrifying efficiency, and their management is soullessly shrewd. If something is risky and expensive because it entails a high chance of a lawsuit or some other penalty, they will think twice about it.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  Or to put it another way, the grandparent's analogy fails because tort law pivots on duty to others and negligence in carrying it out. Criminal law is about non-interference with others and intent in violating that non-interference, which is the polar opposite. Lawsuits (ignoring punitive damages) aren't about deterrence - they're about restoration to the plaintiff. There is no parallel in criminal law.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Actually, no. A massive amount of crime is either primarily or secondarily driven by economics. That is, the crime is conducted for direct financial gain (various black markets, theft, burglary, fraud), to defend a criminal enterprise (turf wars), to gain resources to feed some criminal activity (drugs and gambling addictions, especially), or as a consequence of economic marginalisation (people pushed into desperate situations, or engaging in activities on account of those). (There's also a tremendous amount of white-collar and corporate crime which is never prosecuted, a whole 'nother story. The dumb criminals are the ones who get caught.) Even various forms of tribalistic / hate crimes are often related (with varying levels of justification, having a floor of zero) to economic perceptions. As are crimes of passion or pride or reputation. There's not a whole lot of crime that isn't at least arguably connected to some economic motive or dynamic.

nerdponx 9y ago

The analogy does not work. People commit violent crimes for very different reasons than shitty companies commit economic crimes. And at the end of the day, there is some amount of basic deterrence for people who are not in some kind of adverse mental state. How many more crimes of passion would there be if murder, or assault, were not so harshly penalized? The “deterrence does not work“ line as a matter of degrees, not absolutes, and only applies to a subset of the population. For the rest of us, it works just fine. So to re-join the topic at hand, think of it this way: there will always be outright criminal corporate actors, and deterrence by corporate death will never stop them. These are the Bernie Madoffs and Jeffrey Skillings of the world. Their corporate actors, however, only act the way they do because they are simply are no consequences for doing otherwise, and upper management has evidently quashed their consciences entirely: AT&T (selling deanonymized data with token, non-retractable consent), BP (Gulf oil spill), Equifax (not caring about your security). Lest we forget that these businesses are in the business of making money, and they do so with terrifying efficiency, and their management is soullessly shrewd. If something is risky and expensive because it entails a high chance of a lawsuit or some other penalty, they will think twice about it.

lr4444lr 9y ago
Or to put it another way, the grandparent's analogy fails because tort law pivots on duty to others and negligence in carrying it out. Criminal law is about non-interference with others and intent in violating that non-interference, which is the polar opposite. Lawsuits (ignoring punitive damages) aren't about deterrence - they're about restoration to the plaintiff. There is no parallel in criminal law.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Actually, no. A massive amount of crime is either primarily or secondarily driven by economics. That is, the crime is conducted for direct financial gain (various black markets, theft, burglary, fraud), to defend a criminal enterprise (turf wars), to gain resources to feed some criminal activity (drugs and gambling addictions, especially), or as a consequence of economic marginalisation (people pushed into desperate situations, or engaging in activities on account of those). (There's also a tremendous amount of white-collar and corporate crime which is never prosecuted, a whole 'nother story. The dumb criminals are the ones who get caught.) Even various forms of tribalistic / hate crimes are often related (with varying levels of justification, having a floor of zero) to economic perceptions. As are crimes of passion or pride or reputation. There's not a whole lot of crime that isn't at least arguably connected to some economic motive or dynamic.