>I do agree with you that corporate accountability is often quite poor, but I think the notion that every serious incident should conclude with someone going to prison is simply wrong.

If someone puts a shopping cart filled with lead-acid batteries on the train tracks causing a derailment and toxic chemicals spill all over the area, poisoning and endangering the people nearby, the person responsible should not go to prison?

Or if someone takes an action knowing that it could crash an airliner with hundreds of people aboard, they should not be imprisoned?

By that logic, if I beat you over the head with a tire iron, I should just walk away. Possibly paying an inconsequential fine?

What's that? The individuals involved in poisoning hundreds/thousands or killing hundreds of airline passengers or beating you to death should be prosecuted and made accountable for their actions?

If that's the case, why should folks who knowingly take steps that create the same results not be treated exactly the same way? Because they were "just following orders" from management? Because their only responsibility is to maximize shareholder value?

Having a limited liability corporation is a privilege, not a right. As such, whether it be knowingly risking the lives and/or environments of others or making the cost/benefit analysis that paying fines/settlements will cost less than operating safely and putting others at risk is acceptable is behavior that should not be acceptable in a civilized society.

As I mentioned in another comment, businesses are strongly motivated by the incentives in their marketplace. If we make knowingly and/or negligently putting others at risk of harm both a death sentence for the corporation and criminal liability for those responsible (which includes management, the board and shareholders), we create the appropriate incentives for corporations to do the right thing.

As it stands now, willful, knowing negligence will usually only result in fines/lawsuits that are a pittance and not much of a drag on earnings. Those are not the right incentives.

>Notice that everything on GP's list is fraud (except Gohn of Nissan who was accused of embezzlement and failure to report income). It's very difficult for an executive to go to prison any other way.

I did notice. Which is why my list included mass deaths and massive pollution/ecological destruction, some of which we still don't know what the eventual damage/death toll will be.

And that's the bigger issue: property crimes are considered more serious than mass murder and poisoning our world. Just as with the fraudsters, the corporate veil should have been pierced for the murderers and despoilers of our environment, with harsh prison sentences for those whose avarice and sociopathy allowed them to murder and despoil.

Civil liability is fine, and the "corporate death penalty" (revoking charters, barring directors/managers from future employment, etc.) should be invoked with extreme prejudice in those circumstances as well.

But we don't do that. Because corporations are, in the above circumstance, not "people", but a legal fiction protecting its owners from liability. But when it benefits the corporation and its owners/managers, a corporation is a "person."

I'd say we should work it the other way -- if a corporation is responsible for deaths and despoilation, all the owners should have a share in the punishment.

That way, after a few thousand wealthy individual investors and the owners of a few dozen hedge funds/investment houses are put in SuperMax for a decade or two for the misdeeds of the companies in which they've invested. And let's not make the boards of directors, C-Suite and any others directly involved feel left out either. They can commiserate with their fellow scumbags in the prison yard.

That does sound pretty harsh doesn't it? Perhaps too harsh? I don't think so. Because as we're constantly reminded, business responds strongly to incentives.

And if businesses are strongly incentivized to not poison our citizens, kill airplane passengers and destroy our environment with the threat of long prison sentences and a stripping of their assets, I'd expect they'd respond to such incentives.

But, as it is now, when the incentives are to privatize profit and hold harmless those who kill us, make us sick and destroy our environment, those are the incentives to which corporations will respond.

People generally downvote large blocks of generated text. Perhaps it wasn't your intention to argue for a particular position, but given the context, it's the natural inference. So some downvotes may be because they disagree with the position you appear to be arguing for.

If you want to neutrally answer a rhetorical question in the context of a debate, you're going to have to disclaim that somehow. Otherwise, there's no way for us to know, and the comment walks and talks like an argument.

>Not sure why you rebutting my post or why it is getting downvoted. I just answered the question that asked of list of 5 people who went to jail for corporate crime. I never commented they go to jail every time they deserve(or even most of the time for that matter).

It wasn't a rebuttal of your comment so much as I saw it as an opportunity to show the double standard in play WRT the consequences of ripping off wealthy folks vs. destroying the environment and/or outright maiming and killing people.

I didn't downvote your post either. Although if I'd noted that you "Asked AI", I might well have done so. To be clear, that's not a jab at you personally. Rather, I come to HN to discuss stuff with the other users, not read LLM generated text. If that's what I wanted, I don't need to come here, do I?

Sadly there's more and more of that here, with many folks not even saying they used an LLM (I use that term because "AI" doesn't actually exist) to generate their comment. I appreciate that you did so. Thanks!