Yeah, maybe. I don't disagree with the sentiment, but who is prosecuted for the crime? In US law, there is the concept of corporate personhood, but a corporation has yet to be tried for a crime. And even if it were tried and convicted, how do you sufficiently punish a corporation. You can't put it in jail. Fines don't seem to deter corporations as they're happy to either pay them or settle out of court and move one with business as usual.
If it is to be treated as a crime and we choose to prosecute the people responsible, how do we determine how widely or narrowly to distribute the responsibility? To the CEO of the company or the board? To the management that oversaw the environment damage? Or to the individual workers who were told to perform the actions leading to the environmental damage?
But as we've seen time and again "the shit rolls down hill." Blame will move from the CEO who will claim they knew nothing and will land on the field workers. And while these workers do bear responsibility for complying with directives that caused environmental damage, the power structures in corporations (at least in America with at-will employment and relatively few extant unions) make prosecuting such workers for these crimes an unjust outcome. Their burden of responsibility must be mitigated by the choices they were forced to make between feeding their families and performing a possibly harmful action. Not to mention the fact that such people would in many cases be acting in ignorance of the ramifications of such actions.
Environmental damage is a serious concern, but the way we have positioned private entities in our society makes it nearly impossible to affect any change in their behavior. Adding criminal penalties for such behavior includes the risk that the wrong people are charged and punished while those who bear ultimate responsibility jump from the burning plane in their golden parachutes.
And the penalties will be absorbed by the corporation, aka customers and employees. Limited liability enables sociopaths, sanctions on the other hand come too late and fall too short.
If it is to be treated as a crime and we choose to prosecute the people responsible, how do we determine how widely or narrowly to distribute the responsibility? To the CEO of the company or the board? To the management that oversaw the environment damage? Or to the individual workers who were told to perform the actions leading to the environmental damage?
But as we've seen time and again "the shit rolls down hill." Blame will move from the CEO who will claim they knew nothing and will land on the field workers. And while these workers do bear responsibility for complying with directives that caused environmental damage, the power structures in corporations (at least in America with at-will employment and relatively few extant unions) make prosecuting such workers for these crimes an unjust outcome. Their burden of responsibility must be mitigated by the choices they were forced to make between feeding their families and performing a possibly harmful action. Not to mention the fact that such people would in many cases be acting in ignorance of the ramifications of such actions.
Environmental damage is a serious concern, but the way we have positioned private entities in our society makes it nearly impossible to affect any change in their behavior. Adding criminal penalties for such behavior includes the risk that the wrong people are charged and punished while those who bear ultimate responsibility jump from the burning plane in their golden parachutes.