UC Irvine

This dissertation investigates the prosecution and punishment of corporate crime in the U.S., focusing on the evolution of corporate criminal justice toward a compliance model. The underenforcement and lenient punishment of corporate crime have intensified in recent decades. Drawing on a sociolegal framework, the dissertation explores how various actors socially and politically construct corporate criminality and operationalize corporate penality around compliance within a neoliberal context. It posits that state actors defer to compliance structures in prosecutorial and sentencing decision-making and rely on business organizations and legal professionals to construct the meaning of compliance in corporate criminal justice. This dissertation develops a neoliberal corporate penality theory to elucidate the interplay among the state, the business, and the populace. According to this theory, the U.S. corporate criminal justice system is imbued with neoliberal ideologies and policies characterized by self-policing and self-regulation through the mechanism of legal endogeneity. Building upon this theory, the study examines how various stakeholders develop and propagate compliance rhetoric during the promulgation of the 1991 U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) Organizational Sentencing Guidelines. Additionally, utilizing USSC sentencing data, government documents, and court records, the study engages in quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore how legal actors defer to compliance structures in corporate prosecution and sentencing and how such deference influences legal decisions and outcomes. The findings reveal the significant role of the compliance model in shaping the prosecution and penalization of corporate offending. During the lawmaking of the Organizational Sentencing Guidelines, various actors reframed the legal ideals, devised compliance rhetoric, and mobilized symbolic structures to codify the compliance model into the Sentencing Guidelines. While compliance programs may not always lead to favorable decisions and mitigated penalties for business organizations, they exert a defensive function by facilitating large companies in securing non-criminal dispositions such as Non-Prosecution Agreements (NPAs) and Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPAs). Prosecutors and judges often defer to symbols of existing compliance structures and ongoing and future compliance efforts when determining corporate liability, resolution, and punishment without performing substantive assessments or exercising sufficient oversight. These findings corroborate and add nuances to the theory of legal endogeneity. Building upon the idea of “Too Big to Jail,” this thesis posits that legal deference to compliance structures contributes to the institutionalization of the self-regulation paradigm and the perpetuation of institutional favoritism toward large companies.