What About
Three-Strikes-and-You're-Out for Corporate Criminals?
by
Lee Drutman
Dissident Voice
March 11, 2003
Say what you will about
California's three-strikes law, but one thing's for sure: Many Californians
voted for it in 1994 because they were sick and tired of recidivist criminals
breaking the law over and over. They wanted to get tough and put a real deterrent
on criminal behavior. "Our goal in California is to have no more
victims," said former California Secretary of State Bill Jones, the chief
author of state's three-strikes law.
On March 5, the Supreme
Court affirmed the constitutionality of the law by a 5-to-4 vote. It was a
close vote because a life sentence for a third crime that's relatively minor
borders on cruel and unusual punishment. In practice, it means that Gary Albert
Ewing, an AIDS patient, will get 25 years in prison for stealing $1,200 worth
of golf clubs from a pro shop and Leandro Andrade will get 50 years for
shoplifting $153 worth of children's videos from K-Mart.
Meanwhile, a theft millions
of times as large as either Ewing's or Andrade's remains unpunished and largely
undeterred. Just a few days prior to the Supreme Court ruling, California
officials sent federal regulators 1,000 pages of evidence that they felt proved
once and for all that more than a dozen power companies had conspired to
manipulate energy prices in 2000 and 2001, gouging California ratepayers by $9
billion. Nine billion dollars. Kind of makes $1,200 worth of golf clubs or $153
worth of kid's videos seem like small potatoes. In fact, that's more than twice
the $3.8 billion that the FBI estimates street crime costs its victims each
year across the entire country.
California officials want
the energy companies, including Reliant Resources Inc., Williams Cos., Dynegy
Inc., Mirant and Duke, to pay back the $9 billion they stole from Californians
by overcharging. That's all. Just pay back what you stole. Never mind that you
lied and stole from millions of Californians again and again and again for two
years. Just pay back what you stole and it will all be fine.
Now, imagine if California
had used this same logic with Ewing and Andrade: Just pay back what you stole.
$1,200 worth for the golf clubs. $153 for the videos. Just imagine if this were
the policy of the state attorney general's office: to let shoplifters pay back
the value of what they've stolen - if they got caught. Californians would be up
in arms; they'd say that law and order had vanished, that the state was headed
for chaos and anarchy.
So, what's the difference
between the energy companies and these shoplifters, save the fact that the
energy companies stole about ten million times more money from ten million
times more people?
The main difference, of
course, is that the energy companies engaged in white-collar crime. And in
America, white-collar crime is treated differently. Corporations break the law
over and over again, knowing that they don't have to worry about winding up in
jail (after all, how can you put a corporation in jail?). They might get fined,
but many corporations view fines as merely the cost of doing business, finding
it more profitable to ignore health, safety, and other regulations and risk
paying a fine. Just as street criminals will break the law over and over if
they are not presented with an adequate deterrent, corporate criminals will do
the same.
While the FBI doesn't track
white-collar crime, American University Professor Jeffrey Reiman, using
conservative estimates from the Chamber of Commerce, estimated that
white-collar crime cost $338 billion in 1997 - almost 100 times the FBI's $3.8
billion estimate for street crime costs. Of course, most people are more
frightened of getting mugged outside the grocery store than paying too much
inside the grocery store because of illegal price-fixing. But odds are you'll
lose more money to illegal price-fixing and other white-collar predatory
schemes.
California State Senator
Gloria Romero recently introduced a bill that would hold California's
law-breaking corporations to the same standard to which the state holds its
law-breaking citizens. Three strikes and you're out. If a corporation commits
three major violations that result in a fine of at least $1 million or a death,
the California Attorney General will revoke the corporation's charter. For
companies incorporated in other states, three strikes means that they will lose
their right to transact business in California.
Passing the Corporate Three
Strikes law would demonstrate that California is willing to get tough on crime
in the suites, not just crime in the streets. It would create a climate where
law-abiding companies thrive and give the public a means of cracking down on
recidivist corporate criminals for marketing defective products, exposing their
employees to life-threatening occupational hazards, ripping off utility
customers, or dumping toxic waste down the drain after midnight. If
California's elected officials are truly serious about helping the victims of
crime, and applying a consistent standard of justice to recidivist criminals,
they will pass the Corporate Three Strikes law.
Lee Drutman is the Communications Director for
Citizen Works, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit (www.citizenworks.org). He can contacted
at: