Corporate Crime, Law, and Social Control

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.

• Provides a review of criminal, civil, and regulatory legal systems as they relate to corporate crime control • Contrasts strengths and weaknesses of control strategies based in deterrence and cooperation • Incorporates original research from two empirical surveys

1. Criminalizing the corporate control process; 2. Deterrence in review; 3. Assessing the failure of corporate deterrence; 4. Corporate deterrence and civil justice; 5. Deterrence and regulatory justice; 6. Alternatives to criminalization: cooperative models of corporate compliance; 7. Why comply? Criminalization versus cooperation: an empirical test; 8. Shaping the contours of control.