Corporate Crime: "Three Strikes You're Out?"

Shouldn't the President, Congress and those state legislators who are tripping over themselves in their haste to enact laws decreeing life sentences without the possibility of parole for thrice-convicted violent offenders think about extending the protection of these laws to victims of white-collar crimes?

Assaults on the public by those in business, politics and the professions wreak much more physical and fiscal havoc than street offenders. Workplace injuries and deaths caused by illegal conditions far outnumber the toll from assaults, rapes and murders. Unnecessary surgery, illegal pollution and the dumping of toxic wastes consign more people to the cemeteries than the offenses by felons whose menace has triggered the spate of "three strikes you're out" bills.

Why can't these white-collar depredations be treated the same way as other offenses so that we can have equal protection? Does the compassion of lawmakers for a beleaguered citizenry extend no further than street crimes? Surely they want to keep us safe from all violations of the law that threaten to kill us. They must appreciate that we will be just as dead if we are killed in a car accident that results from a deliberate and illegal failure to build a safe vehicle as we will be if we are killed by a mugger. Dying from taking a drug allowed on the market only because the tests required by a government regulatory agency were faked is no less a death than one that results from a barroom brawl.

There would be substantial side benefits from including white-collar offenders in the "three strikes" laws. Prison wardens tell us that what they most require to upgrade their facilities is a better class of clientele. A while back, after a General Electric vice president was sentenced to 30 days jail time for price fixing, the warden came to sing his praises. In true entrepreneurial spirit, the prisoner had gone to work zealously updating the jail's archaic bookkeeping system. If this man's skills had been freely available to the penal system for the remainder of his life, imagine what could have been accomplished.

The "three strikes you're out" campaign seeks to deter potential violators and to incapacitate those street offenders whose behavior has gone beyond society's tolerance. As a political ploy, it is exemplary. Oppose it and you will be accused of being sympathetic to criminals and callous about victims' well-being.

The "three strikes" proposal also is attractive because its awesome embrace now falls only upon those "other people," not upon us, the decent folk. We might in a startlingly rare moment lash out violently at a sassy wife or husband or slap an obnoxious kid around a bit for the kid's own good. But we are sensible and calculating. That's how we got where we are. If we are caught once or twice at these domestic peccadilloes we will have enough wit to cease and desist.

It's those other people who don't learn the lesson. We are tired of hearing their excuses about poverty, frustration and anger. We are fed up with their lack of self-control. We want them to be put away, out of our sight. Even if the likelihood that they might hurt us is extraordinarily low, we do not want to take that chance.

But if we truly want to protect ourselves we are going to have to deal with the white-collar offenders who prey upon us. Note, for example, a doctor in California who, to collect $1 million in fees over five years, performed cataract operations on patients whose sight was perfectly fine. He blinded a number of these patients.

The judge, imposing a 4-year prison sentence, called attention to other physicians who had written to him seeking leniency for the defendant. "They seem to think the whole trial is a contrivance by the attorney general's office," the judge declared. "In not one letter was there a word of sympathy for the true victims, the uneducated, Spanish-speaking people, some of whom will never see a sunrise or sunset again."

The workaday depredations of businessmen, politicians and professionals would have to be calculated by use of a somewhat different formula if they are going to be included in the three strikes you're out category. Typically, these are ongoing crimes rather than separable acts.

How about declaring that as a white-collar offender you will be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole under the "three strikes you're out" law if you are responsible for having maimed or killed thirty persons. Or should it be fifty?

Gilbert Geis is a professor emeritus in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at University of California, Irvine.