Steve Tombs & David Whyte highlight the dangers of reducing corporate prosecutions
Criminal Liability in Regulatory Contexts—the title of a recent (August 2010) Law Commission Consultation Document—might prompt the same response as Gandhi had when he heard the phrase “western democracy”.
Any longstanding critics of the consistent failure of law to hold corporations to account for their criminal conduct would have had any hopes of progressive reform dashed early on in its reading, where its organising assumption is stated baldly: “In regulated fields, reliance on the criminal law as the main means of deterring and punishing unwanted behaviour may prove to be an expensive, uncertain and ineffective strategy” (para 1.8). From here then flow a series of proposals which, in our view, will only further undermine the prospects for reversing the decriminalisation of illegal corporate conduct.
Evidence? What evidence?
The assumption encapsulated in the above quotation is by no means an unfamiliar one—and it is one which has gathered momentum in the UK in recent years. Such a claim is, for example,
