ABSTRACT
The sentences received by corporate offenders have traditionally been seen as an example of injustice in the criminal justice system. The vast majority receive fines which are often characterised as too small, whether in relation to the harm which offences involve or to their limited impact on the resources of the corporation. This can be attributed to a combination of legal and sociological factors. Legally it can be argued that the criminal justice system does not deal adequately with the corporate form, neither in attributing responsibility generally to the company, nor in devising a range of sanctions which effectively deal with the corporation by any measure of the aims of punishment. The reliance of criminal law and punishment on notions of individual responsibility makes it difficult to find the business or corporation 'guilty' of a crime and to see it as 'deserving' of punishment (Wells 1993; Slapper and Tombs 1999; Ross 1999). This is related to how crime is socially constructed with corporate crimes being legally and popularly regarded as 'technical' matters of regulation rather than as 'real crimes' (Croall 2001). Attempts to strengthen the law and sentencing in relation to corporate offenders must therefore take into account both the legal difficulties surrounding corporate liability and the way in which corporate crime is socially and ideologically constructed. Tailoring law and sentences to the corporate form can lead to 'downgrading' corporate offenders, seeing their offences as distinct from and thereby less 'criminal' than those of conventional offenders.
