normally a person would go to jail. But corporations just pay a fine. I think we really need to come up with punishments that are actual deterrents. Like any time a corporation ends up killing someone from negligence there needs to be an action that is equivalent and scaled appropriately.
Send the corporation to jail. That means it cannot conduct business for the same amount of time that we would put a person in jail.
If "corporations are people" then there should be a way to incarcerate and/or execute criminal corporations. And we the people should do it roughly as regularly as we incarcerate/execute actual human criminals.
Corporations don't actually exist, except on paper. Preserve the records, and you can un-execute them if need be. This suggests we should be executing corporations more readily than we execute humans.
Possibly, but start with prosecuting humans (company staff and directors) as accessories to the crime.
The last time that a major corporation was found guilty for criminal behavior (Arthur Andersen in 2002 for Enron related stuff) the company closed immediately. This has led to problems in the audit industry, where was once the Big 8 audit firms has shrunk, due to mergers and AA dissolving, there basically are barely enough firms to independently audit each others books, and it's made the audit market much worse.
The MCI Worldcom fraud, which broke shortly after Enron, might also have doomed AA (they were the auditor for both major frauds of 2002). MCI Worldcom filed for bankruptcy before it could be hit with criminal charges, and the SEC ended up operating MCI-W in the bankruptcy, because the fines were so large and are senior to all other debts, so they outmuscled all of the other creditors in the bankruptcy filings. Which was why they weren't hit with criminal charges- they already belonged to the Government. There hasn't been much stomach for criminal charges against a corporation ever since.
The fact that the Supreme Court has spent the past few decades making white collar crimes much harder to prosecute (including with Arthur Andersen, where they unanimously reversed the conviction in 2005) is another major factor. The Supreme Court has always been terrible, and gets far more respect than it deserves.
No need for anything so drastic, just make the fines a sufficiently large percentage of corporate free cash flow.
Make negligence unprofitable and the profit-optimizers will take care of the rest. Then 80 years later when people get too used to "trustworthy" corporationns we can deregulate everything and repeat the cycle