Steal from the grocery store, go to jail.

Double park, pay the ticket.

But why doesn't this simple principle apply to corporations and their executives?

As of this writing, of all of the U.S. corporate financial crimes committed that have cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the past couple of years, only two top level executives are in prison.

That's it -- two.

Now, ask yourself, if working class people committed crimes that cost hundreds of billions of dollars -- inconceivable as it is -- how many would be in prison? The whole lot of them.

So, how is it that corporations and their executives get away with it?
[...]

Harry Glasbeek is a professor of criminal law at York University in Toronto. He has studied corporate crime and written a book about it called Wealth By Stealth: Corporate Crime, Corporate Law, and the Perversion of Democracy.

Glasbeek says that the creation of the corporation allowed for this "fungibility of responsibility."

"Sometimes the executives plead the corporation to relieve the executives from responsibility," Glasbeek says. "Sometimes the corporation causes the executives to plead, a couple of people take the fall. And it is very difficult. We have created a separate entity with separate property. You have a functional notion that property yields the income stream and wealth to people outside the separate entity. You have in-between actors who belong to both classes, the corporation and the outsiders. So, you have multiple personalities with different legal duties and rights that the actors are allowed to take on at any one time. That allows a shifting of responsibility that we cannot control."

Call it Multiple Corporate Personality Disorder (MCPD).

Glasbeek says this disorder undermines our notion of responsibility, which "supposedly depends on the individual taking responsibility for his or her own actions."