Should We Execute Corporate Criminals?
Should We Execute Corporate Criminals?
I think that we’re way too lenient on corporate criminals. I consider this a Sales issue because selling depends on building a strong relationship between the buyer and seller. Corporate criminals, whether in sales or elsewhere in the company, break the compact of trust that is the key to long-lasting business success.
Before I go any further, let me provide a little perspective. In Rialto California, some gang member pretended to be a CEO who had gotten a bad order from a fast food outlet, and convinced the outlet to give him some free food. He posted the experience on YouTube, was arrested, and charged with felony second-degree commercial burglary. The poor sap now faces the possibility of 7 years in prison…for stealing $15 worth of semi-edible food.
As you’re no doubt aware, there are numerous corporate criminals who have stolen millions of dollars from investors and ended up with far less than 7 years of jail time. The assumption in our criminal justice system is that “white collar” crime is less serious than “street crime,” because street crime is violent. The idea is that stealing $25 million is supposedly less “evil” than, say, shooting somebody.
But is that really the case? When you steal somebody’s life savings, you’re stealing the fruit of years of effort. As the award-winning author Jack Vance points out:
“Property and live and not incommensurable, when property is measured in terms of human toil. Essentially property is life; it is that proportion of life which an individual has expended to gain the property. When a thief steals property, he steals life. Each act of pillage therefore becomes a small murder…I am tolerant of human weakness, and I would not react vigorously to the theft of a day. I would resent the theft of a week; I would kill the thief who stole a year of my life.” (The Faceless Man, 1971)
When a large amount of property is stolen (say, ten times the life savings of an average investor), it seems reasonable to me that the crime should be treated as a form of murder and punished appropriately.
This is one area where I think China has it right and the United States has it wrong. A few years ago, Jin Jianpei, the former director of the Hong Kong Office of Hubei Province was caught embezzling roughly $24 million. If he’d been a crooked executive in the U.S., he’d probably have paid a fine, served a year in a low-security resort, and then made big bucks on the lecture circuit.
But that didn’t happen. Jin Jianpei was tried and executed. And, if I’m not mistaken, the death penalty in China at the time was a bullet to the back of the head. Sounds fair to me.
If we implemented something similar in the United States (and more consistently than it’s applied in China), I predict that “big money” white collar crime would disappear overnight.
While it’s true that Draconian penalties don’t prevent street crime, that’s only because street criminals typically have poor impulse control and an unrealistic view of the likelihood of getting caught. I think if the next Michael Milken knew he’d be facing hard time on death row — and the big needle — there’d be 10 seconds of risk analysis and, poof!, the crime would go uncommitted.
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