Rick Claypool Research Director, Office of the President at Public Citizen U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary

The same is true of the 346 lives lost to Boeing’s 737 Max crashes and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost to Purdue Pharma and its peers’ pushing prescription opioids.5 The unfathomable cost of corporate misconduct means a strong and effective federal enforcement system is required to deter, discipline, and hold accountable lawbreaking corporations. [...] The DOJ filed fewer of these cases in 2022 than in any year since 2004.24 Looking to the 2023 fiscal year, which concluded at the end of September, and farther into the future, the signs for how the DOJ will proceed are mixed. [...] The DOJ’s practice of bending over backwards to protect corporate offenders from the consequences of their own misconduct creates the ideal criminogenic conditions for the next corporate catastrophe. [...] The stories of two of the worst corporate-caused crises of the 21st Century – the pharmaceutical industry-driven opioid epidemic and the 2008 financial crisis – are partly stories about enforcement agencies failing to fight systemically criminal misconduct before it was too late. [...] A society that punishes the crimes of the poor while permitting the crimes of the powerful is not a just society.