Carlton Vogt writes on ethics in InfoWorld.com. In his 12 July column, he discusses the current corporate scandals, and makes an interesting observation:
As I write this, the Bush administration is proposing that we double the penalties for corporate crime, and I’m not sure how that is going to solve the situation. I have this humorous vision of a CEO wanting to cook the books, and deciding that he’d risk it for five years in jail, but that 10 years is just too much. That doesn’t make sense.
The biggest problem is that the real wrongdoers are seldom caught, and if they are, they are fairly certain that they won’t be convicted. As with most other crime, people often think that what they’re doing isn’t wrong or think they won’t be caught. The remedy is not the severity of the punishment, but rather whether punishment is swift and certain. That’s our worst systemic failure: Really rich and well-connected people very rarely go to jail. Until we change that, the system will still enable and encourage personal failure.
I don’t know if there’s an easy (if any) solution to effect that change, but I think he’s onto something there.