Deterring Corporate Crime

• Author: Ray Paternoster
• Date: 01 May 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12200
• Published date: 01 May 2016

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

CORPORATE CRIME DETERRENCE

Deterring Corporate Crime

Evidence and Outlook

Ray Paternoster

University of Maryland—College Park

“A criminal is a person with predatory instincts without sufficient capital to form a

corporation.”—Clarence Darrow

“The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped

around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything

that smells like money.”—Matt Taibbi

Evidence-based practice (EBP) has hit criminology with a vengeance. The basic idea

behind EBP is that decisions about how to promote some individual (health) or

public (crime) good should be based on the best available empirical evidence as

to what “treatments” work best and why. Since being introduced in medicine as early as

1992, it has spread to other health fields (such as dentistry and nursing) and nonmedical

disciplines (such as social work and psychology). It has, of course, entered the field of

criminology primarily, but not exclusively, through evidence-based policing (Sherman,

1998).1The intradisciplinary EBP bug has spread as quickly as its interdisciplinary cousin,

and we now have such offshoots as evidence-based corrections, evidence-based sentencing,

and other variants. Proponents of EBP in criminology/criminal justice have argued that

evidence-based programs should be directed at (a) providing meaningful summaries of

existing practices and (b) mapping the direction of inferentially sound studies in the future.

The favored methodology of the first effort is meta-analysis, whereas that of the second is

the randomized experiment.

Natalie Schell-Busey,Sally Simpson, Melissa Rorie, and Mariel Alper (2016, this issue)

present to my knowledge the first (or at least one of the first) meta-analyses of studies that

examine corporate crime deterrence. Their technical work is competently done, but as the

Direct correspondence to Ray Paternoster, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of

Maryland, 2129 LeFrak Hall, 7251 Preinkert Drive, College Park, MD 20742 (e-mail: rpaterno@umd.edu).

1. As evidence of its institutionalization, there is a Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George

Mason University that publishes its own journal,

Translational Criminology

.

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12200 C2016 American Society of Criminology 383

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 2