"What should be the role of the criminal law in controlling corporate behavior, and how can the execution of that role be improved? On the one hand, corporations have enormous power, and, when a corporation causes harm, there is a natural instinct to apply criminal sanctions, society's most serious expression of moral disapproval. In the wake of a harm in which a corporation had a prominent role, there are often calls for an increased use of the criminal law to tame corporate excesses. On the other hand, criminal liability has historically usually required criminal intent, a concept that applies oddly to a legal construction, such as a corporation. And more recently, critics have decried what they have termed the overcriminalization of corporate behavior, suggesting that there has been an overreliance on the use of criminal law in this context. To provide guidance to policymakers on the proper role of criminal sanctions in this context, RAND Corporation researchers (1) measure the current use of criminal sanctions in controlling corporate behavior, (2) describe how the current regime developed, and (3) offer suggestions about how the use of criminal sanctions to control corporate behavior might be improved"--Unedited summary from book cover.

Corporate Crime, originally published in 1980, is the first and still the only comprehensive study of corporate law violations by our largest corporations. The book laid the groundwork for analyses of important aspects of corporate behavior. It defined corporate crime and found ways of locating corporate violations from various sources. It even drew up measures of the seriousness of crimes. Much of this book still applies today to the corporate world and its illegal behavior.A new introduction, "Corporate Crime: Yesterday and Today--A Comparison," prepared for this edition by coauthor Marshall B. Clinard, discusses the development of a criminological interest in corporate crime, explains the nature of corporate crime, and analyzes a number of issues involved in its study. Among the issues tackled are whether today's corporate crime is greater, more serious, and more complex; accounting fraud and its crucial role in hiding corporate crime; the pharmaceuticals, the industry with the most corporate violations; explanations of corporate crime in terms of economic factors, corporate culture, and the role of top executives; and new laws to control corporate crime and alternative approaches.

Why do corporations obey the law? When companies violate the law, what kinds of interventions are most apt to correct their behavior and return them to compliant status? In this book Sally Simpson examines whether the shift towards the use of criminal law, with its emphasis on punishment and stigmatization, is an effective strategy for controlling illegal corporate behavior. She concludes that strict criminalization models will not yield sufficiently high levels of compliance. Empirical data suggest that in most cases cooperative models work best with most corporate offenders. Because some corporate managers, however, respond primarily to instrumental concerns, Simpson argues that compliance should also be buttressed by punitive strategies. Her review and application of the relevant empirical literature on corporate crime and compliance combined with her judicious examination of theory and approaches, make a valuable new contribution to the literature on white-collar crime and deterrence and criminal behavior more generally.

Can a corporation commit a crime? If so, who in the organization is to be held responsible and how does a criminal justice system, designed to process individual criminals, cope with the criminal corporation? This book explores both the theoretical and practical problems of bringing criminal sanctions against corporate offenders through the courts and regulatory agencies, and offers some of the latest legal, historical and sociological research on the subject of sanctionning corporate wrongs.

Who should police corporate misconduct and how should it be policed? In recent years, the Department of Justice has resolved investigations of dozens of Fortune 500 companies via deferred prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements, where, instead of facing criminal charges, these companies become regulated by outside agencies. Increasingly, the threat of prosecution and such prosecution agreements is being used to regulate corporate behavior. This practice has been sharply criticized on numerous fronts: agreements are too lenient, there is too little oversight of these agreements, and, perhaps most important, the criminal prosecutors doing the regulating aren’t subject to the same checks and balances that civil regulatory agencies are. Prosecutors in the Boardroom explores the questions raised by this practice by compiling the insights of the leading lights in the field, including criminal law professors who specialize in the field of corporate criminal liability and criminal law, a top economist at the SEC who studies corporate wrongdoing, and a leading expert on the use of monitors in criminal law. The essays in this volume move beyond criticisms of the practice to closely examine exactly how regulation by prosecutors works. Broadly, the contributors consider who should police corporate misconduct and how it should be policed, and in conclusion offer a policy blueprint of best practices for federal and state prosecution. Contributors: Cindy R. Alexander, Jennifer Arlen, Anthony S. Barkow, Rachel E. Barkow, Sara Sun Beale, Samuel W. Buell, Mark A. Cohen, Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, Richard A. Epstein, Brandon L. Garrett, Lisa Kern Griffin, and Vikramaditya Khanna