Tragic price of corporate crime outweights street crime

Gene Racz reports:

The New York Times recently reported that the government has basically stopped prosecuting corporations for crimes despite the fact that costs of corporate crime far outweighs street crime. Eric Lichtblau, writing for the Times, noted that during the last three years, the U.S. Justice Department has put off prosecuting more than 50 corporations on charges ranging from bribery to fraud. Instead, it has been entering into so-called deferred prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements, in which companies are allowed to pay fines and hire monitors to watch over them.

Russell Mokhiber, editor of the “Corporate Crime Reporter,” notes that “corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined.”

In his speech last year at a conference in Washington, D.C., Mokhiber noted FBI estimates that put the cost of burglary and robbery “street crimes” to the nation at $3.8 billion a year and that those losses were “swamped” by losses from only a handful of major corporate frauds — Tyco, Adelphia, Worldcom, Enron.

The article continues:

Corporate crime is often violent crime with very real victims. Mokhiber points out that while the FBI estimates that 16,000 Americans are murdered every year “56,000 Americans die every year on the job or from occupational diseases such as black lung and asbestosis while tens of thousands of other Americans fall victim to the silent violence of pollution, contaminated foods, hazardous consumer products, and hospital malpractice.”