Further, "personhood" means you can sue the corporation, it can hold property, etc. Lawyers usual call "corporate personhood" "legal entity."
Sure it does - if I am killed by a natural person due to negligence, the state can imprison the person who killed me. If I am killed by a corporation due to negligence, the state generally does not imprison any individual, because of the "corporate veil." If you get rid of the corporate veil, then that's totally fine with me. (It's just like, if human beings wish to organize for political action, they don't get any more votes that way - they still only vote as humans.)
> Further, "personhood" means you can sue the corporation, it can hold property, etc. Lawyers usual call "corporate personhood" "legal entity."
So, one of the common effects of prison is deprivation of the right to property - you don't get to access your house or the stuff in it while you're in prison. This is generally considered to be an important part of the deterrence. Why don't we do the same to corporations? Let's say that Walmart doesn't lose any of the property it owns, but for a period of a couple of years, it loses access to it.
Another side effect of jail is a loss or at least serious restriction on communications privileges with the outside world, which we can also equally well apply to corporations. Why don't we say that this applies to corporations too? While Walmart is imprisoned, no communications on behalf of the company can occur, except for access to its lawyer.
(Or get rid of prison for natural persons, I'm on board with that.)
To meaningfully create a deterrent effect, there has to be a set of people who cannot avail themselves of the Corporate veil. That group of people would most reasonably be at a minimum the C-Suite, but frankly, I'm not sure you'd do anything but end up creating a practice whereby the "C-Suite" people end up becoming sacrificial, or are specifically structured into having some form of plausible deniability via isolation from information by underlings.
Corporations as a concept were extremely controversial, and rarely granted at first due to concerns of being able to absolve people of legal responsibility for actions undertaken under the flag of the Corp.
I think that a good middle ground would be that upon being judged against, a Corporation must for a period submit to serving a period in which their ability to operate is contingent upon the presence of State agents/regulators tasked with ensuring the previous behavior is remedied and no other problems exist. This includes all results of investigations into potentially illegal behavior becoming a matter of public record. This would have a satisfying parity with the practice of submitting to supervision by a parole officer.
There is some potential for abuse; but seeing as that system works just fine for petty crimes, I don't see why it wouldn't work for corporations.
There's also the bonus that it also in a way "punishes" shareholders by decreasing the opportunity for abnormal growth rates fostered by shady business practices.
Oh, one more thing.
Something may need to be done to prevent corporate engineering where assets are sold to other corporations, owned by a holding company, established for the purpose of buying out the sanctioned corporation's assets, poaching the employees, and effectively picking up where the last Corp left off, but cleaned of the government oversight. I'm thinking any liquidation or selling off of assets has to be handled through bankruptcy court.
You wouldn't necessarily want everyone staying, but I have the feeling no one would be comfortable with taking away the authority and mandate to clean up house from the Board of Directors, but I think the contents of their communique's w.r.t. the sanctioned corporation could become a (sealed for a time) matter of public record, with a State representative as a non-voting, or only tie-breaking vote on the Board
Anyway... My two cents.
This doesn't apply to imprisonment of humans, right? If I go to prison tomorrow, my employer is deprived of my labor, my skills, and my knowledge without due process and through no fault of their own. Sure, they don't have to pay me, but they're also not going to get back their investment in training me and the institutional knowledge I have of how stuff happens at my company. (I am at-will, as it happens, but I'm pretty sure this is not different if I had a fixed-term contract.)
If you make a deal with someone who goes to prison, and they can't execute on that deal, it's your own problem that you made a bad choice of deal partner. Sure, you can sue for breach of contract, but it won't actually get them to do the thing you were hoping they'd do anytime soon. Why is it different when the corporation is the person with whom you made that deal?
