Problems associated with defining and determining the frequency of corporate crime and solutions
Even though, there is no significant source of data on the frequency of corporate crime cases in any of the state or federal courts, the U.S sentencing commission provides the superlative source of data. However, the commission does not provide an ideal data source since it accumulates information on cases of companies that have been sentenced with federal crime. Averagely, the number of corporations convicted annually in federal courts ranges between 200 and 350, with their crimes extending from tax law damage to environmental offenses. A lot of these corporations are small privately owned companies. Actually, between November 1996 and June 2005 almost 92% of all companies convicted had less than fifty workers. Less than 5% of all convicted companies employed less than 500 individuals (Adler, Mueller, & Laufer, 2012).
Nevertheless, defining corporate crime has proved to be quite challenging. Considering a case such as Exxon Valdezran from Alaska that spilt 250, 000 barrels of oil in 1989, it was difficult to determine the liability of the corporation and if it could be defined as a corporate crime. Although this spill became the greatest North America’s environmental tragedy, the prosecutors focused mostly on evaluating the charge on the captain, his officers and his crew. The same challenge was experienced with determining a criminal charge against Arthur Andersen. In this case, the cardinal problem was determining if the corporation could be held responsible for crimes of its employees. The company employed several men in crude camps and set them on a drilling rock in a tunnel without safety equipment. The employees breathed in silicon dust resulting into silicosis, a chronic lung disease causing rapid death. Most of them died and were buried secretly by security guards. Works continued, and more deaths occurred. However, it was difficult to determine who was responsible and if it was the company, could it be defined as a corporate crime (Hartley, 2008).
Almost a century has passed since criminal law was first applied to companies. There has been a growing interest in an active, responsive, culture-based, and company policies to help in the definition of corporate crime, especially with regard to their responsibility. Models that have been developed such as Proactive Corporate Faults (PCF) and Reactive Corporate Faults (RCF) can be proven quite useful. PCF presents the measure where the company is to blame in the situation that a grave crime is committed. This shows that the company is liable to be questioned in the situation that a crime is committed to generate irregular performance. In addition, RCF takes into account the response of a company towards the detection of a criminal act. The suggestion of how best a company responds to the finding of a fault forms the basis of charging the responsibility. According to this theory, if a corporation fails to take necessary measures to correct the crime then it indicates a responsibility for it. Another, useful theory is corporate ethos, where a company is held responsible if encourages its agents or employees to perform a criminal act. These corporate ethos are determined by factors such as corporate goals, strategies, policies, hierarchy, as well as their efforts to safeguard obedience with the ethics, ciphers and authorized principles, and the prosecution of the guilty employees. In addition, enquiries on the part of the directors and ways in the company have responded to past abuses can be observed, as well (Mokhiber, 1988).
References
Adler, F, Mueller, G & Laufer, W. (2012). Criminology. McGraw-Hill Companies
Hartley, R. D. (2008). Corporate crime: A reference handbook. Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO.
Mokhiber, R. (1988). Corporate crime and violence: Big business power and the abuse of the public trust. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
