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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

The US is a pretty strange place when Bank of America can literally break into someone's home, steal everything they own, and never suffer either financially or criminally, but all a corporation has to do is point their finger at an individual and that individual will be arrested and prosecuted.

It also reminds me of the AT&T case where someone accessed records on public URLs and instead of AT&T getting a black eye for being so incompetent the dude went to jail. When will a corporation metaphorically go to jail? They steal, they lie, they cheat, they launder money, but yet they're always "too big to prosecute."

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>the AT&T case where someone accessed records on public URLs

For those not in the know, that someone was weev [1].

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#AT.26T_data_breach

That somebody was Jackson Games in 1993 somewhat earlier:

http://www.sjgames.com/SS/topten.html

(Not quite public URLs as the WWW was quite new at the time, but public information all the same.)

Weev is a dick, but what he did in that specific case shouldn't have been a interpreted as a crime, and I would have preferred his conviction be overturned on that basis, rather than the venue issue.

While I don't think weev should have gone to jail, I can't help but think there was a sense of "we have to get this guy for something," like locking up Al Capone for cheating on his taxes.

Weev probably should be in jail, just not for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#Trolling I probably would have been OK with them nailing him for "something", but the AT&T case set a bad precedent.

I'm uncomfortable with allowing prosecutors the leeway to just kind of decide who should be in jail based on gut judgements but I'm clearly in the minority because that's not the way the law or politics are moving (like look at the guys getting nailed for mail fraud because of Massachusetts patronage scandals that technically were probably not illegal).

>Bank of America can literally break into someone's home, steal everything they own

I searched but didn't find anything about BoA home invasion. Link to story?

He's referring to several cases where they "foreclose" on the incorrect home. They break into homes, take everything in them, and auction it off and throw away anything they can't sell.

While malicious intent may be absent, to the victims that does not matter one iota.

Can you cite an example for the Bank of America mention? Is it hyperbole?

No, not at all. And they did it multiple times too(!). Here's just one example: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/bank-america-sued-foreclosing...

And when they do get prosecuted, the punishment is laughable, typically a fine equal to weeks of profit, maybe months if it's something really terrible.

I'd like to see how corporate behavior changes if "jail" was a real possibility. For a crime that an individual would get two years in prison, shut down the company for two years. They can try to pick up the pieces after that period, just like the individual.

The problem with that is it would put lots of innocent employees out of work. You'd have to sell the company to a competitor or something so that the operation kept going but shareholders got wiped out. Make shareholders feel the pain and the behavior will change.

I think at a minimum firing all CXX level employees and the loss of all stock options/pending bonuses is a good compromise. Fines harm investors, but the actual people that decide to break the law are rarely impacted.

Investors should be harmed if they invest in enterprises that engage in criminal acts. Perhaps then there will be a bit more appetite for some ethics at the expense of a little profit.

Not only that but you'll get shorts interested in criminal companies because they can profit by exposing wrong-doing. And, on the other side, the market will discount a company's stock if it is criminal which kills the executives incentives to take these actions.

Hamstringing the company is going to do a lot of collateral damage to innoccents. I mean, if all CXX level people are guilty then so be it- but purely punitive beheading of a company's leadership? Come on.

Force the company to issue new shares up to some proportion of their value and give them to whoever is deemed appropriate?

The same sort of thing happens when individuals go to jail. Family members lose their means of support, children lose their parents, etc. One person going to jail can potentially devastate an entire innocent extended family. That doesn't stop us.

If your actions are destroying other people's lives and unlawfully disposessing them of their homes, then the word you're looking for is "criminally negligent". Not "innocent".

Nazi guards tried that defense. Didn't work for them either.

(Some of them were relatives of mine.)

I'm talking about people like [Schindler](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler) who was a Nazi but obviously not following orders. In a corporation with tens of thousands of employees, not all of them will have conspired to break the law. Those are the people that shouldn't be subject to putative measures.

A much better idea than that is to actually imprison all the top level executives of the company if their company commits a crime that would get an individual thrown in prison.

Nono, those corporations are just rational actors, as the book of the free market tells us.

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