For habitual offenders there are laws that have been passed on both the State as well as the Federal level, that stipulate that after three violent or serious felonies, the offender is thereupon sentenced to life in prison. It would seem that if this law is considered to be fair to be applied against individuals, then it should also be fair to be utilized against corporations; though the structure of such a law would need to be somewhat amended, since few corporations, for example, actually directly murder any one individual. It is well to remember, though, that corporations have been convicted of environmental crimes that have led to serious health issues and subsequent deaths of individuals, as well as crimes such as illegal money laundering, outright fraud, and other assorted criminal offenses, of which, most of these crimes could and should be considered to be felonious in nature. So too, any corporate crime that impacts the health of a given individual or the well being of an individual, could be considered to be violent to that individual because of its overall deleterious effect.
All of the above means that what is obviously considered by the general public and prosecutorial agencies as being good for the goose should also be good for the gander. This signifies that justice departments should begin to put into place the necessary legal process to begin treating corporate criminals in a manner in which those that are habitual offenders are punished as being incorrigible and hence unable to be successfully rehabilitated.
Although corporations have been adjudged to being the equivalent of a person, an actual corporation cannot actually be locked away; however, the next best thing to the locking up of a habitual offending corporation is to divest that corporation of all of its assets to competing companies that are in compliance with the law; and in absence of any competing companies that are qualified, then ownership should revert to the people, and thereby the people’s governmental representatives.
Not only would the corporate law of three-strikes put all offending corporations on clear notice, but it would clearly clean up the very mess that corporate crime has systematically created and made for this country and this world, in which corporations would no longer be able to get off with a mere slap on their wrist, or some sort of monetary penalty, but would instead suffer the indignity of being taken over by their competition or by their government. Finally, it could be said that corporations would truly have to face the music for being legally considered to be people and bad behavior would be punished in accordance with the law, fully applied.
The sad but true thing about corporations is that they know, as the law now stands and is applied, that individuals within that corporation, no matter what they do, and no matter what they authorize, and no matter how many people become ill or die, that those individuals will in virtually every case, not be held accountable. While the corporate three-strike law would not change that, it would change the behavior by those humans within that corporation, because being taken over by a competitor or by the government, essentially means that it is no longer business as usual, but rather the reaping of what these corporations have so sown.