Corporate prosecutions admit guilt while leaving crimes personless and executives unpunished

Evidence

These bank settlements reflect a shift in policy from civil settlements and deferred prosecutions to requiring corporations at least to admit to criminal practices. The Justice Department is apparently no longer scared by the “Chicken Little routine,” as the U.S. attorney Preet Bharara calls it, that admission of corporate criminal wrongdoing will do serious damage to world economies. This new phase of adjudication includes admission of corporate guilt, but corporate crimes continue to be treated as personless crimes. Top executives still remain above the law. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1587

Categorization

• XREF: Personless crimes — the collective, agentless framing — parallels Bandura’s own diffusion-of-responsibility mechanism and the vault’s claims about depersonalized policy support.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1587