From where rena is going to dive in and the starting point of the conversation is to recognize our country has an epidemic of corporate crime, abuse and violence which we all suffer. It is evident in the financial crisis and the bp blow up and spill and numerous foot safety disasters that kill people from the new england compounding scandal, and workplace issues that rise across the country on a daily bases and more. You can step back saying we as a country dont do a good job with these problems because one marker is they persist over a period of time. We have a way of setting rules for corporations. You can fought imperil human life, threaten the environment, no you cant rip us off we dont do a good job enforcing the rules. We have to have inspectors looking at factories, supervisors to look at banks and we are not doing a good job funding those positions and they dont get enough support from the top to do such. When we do find violations, the hue is what do we do with companies that have broken civil or criminal law. What do we do . That is where renas book focuses. Both on that question and making the argument that we should focus especially on that third question because we did such a poor job on the first two. If you focus on criminal sanctions we can overcome limits and our inability to impose proper standards on corporate behavior. This is a chronic and acute problem. Todays New York Times has a front page story in the business section laws hinder in prosecuting gm employees and the opening says from the factory floor to the corporate sweep, employees saw indication of a deadly ignition defect and failed to report to the government. Yet, even as the prosecutors are closing in on the automaker the effort to charge individually employees hit an obstacle from legal hoop holes created. They struggle with oversight of carmakers gap according to experts who understand what is going on. I think that is a jumping point rena who will com plain and say the prosecutors should step up even with improper rules. We turn it over to rena steinizor, professor at the university of maryland law school, and author of why not jail and long time president of peace for reform. I appreciate a lot of you coming. I see a lot of familiar faces and that makes me happy. I think rob, who is doing a great job leading an essential organization in difficult times. And to russell, who really deserves a subscription to his news letter which is anything but dry and boring and finally to Catherine Jones who greeted you at the door. She is the person that sort of setup the nuts and bolts of this event and cprs secret weapon. I am very grateful to her. I have a simple agenda for my 20 minutes and that is to convince you that criminal prosecution of corporate managers and corporations themselves in the worst Health Safety and environmental cases should be among our Top Priorities as a nation and as a student. We should work in a concerted and relentless way to promote those kinds of prosecutions. On some level, you all agree that bad guys should go to jail. But our community as a whole does not spend much time, largely because we have been fighting blazing fires all over town, focusing on that solution and i think it is one that has a lot of poplar appeal and has the potential to break through the regulatory gridlock we find ourselves emeshed in. My first argument is a matter of ethical politics or political ethics. We do manage on some level to fight every day cases of fraud and embezzlement at the state level. At the federal level, there has been a shocking neglect of these kinds of faces. And as we begin to talk about the critical issue of mass incarceration which is the sort of outcome of all of the terrible things happening in our city to people of color i think it is important we raise the other side of it which is the justice system, some would say the injustice system in the country is very good at throwing poor people of color in jail and very bad about policing rich Corporate Executives and managers who are so reckless that people die in the workplace, as consumers, and we suffer damage to the environment and i am thinking of bp that was an Amazing Company for ten years and wracked on the knuckles many times until its final act was so sensational and even now the company is saying they are coming pack and their stock prices are back. This reflects discrimination of two classes of people and touts the goals of the criminal justice system. Long standing belief that criminal prosecutions are good because they punish people, deter crime, and in the white collar area nothing could decrease crime more and crime should reflect the values of our community. As rob also mentioned, we have great indication that the American People are absolutely disgusted by the failure to prosecute the banks for what happened in 2008. Polling from the bass association, a cosponsor of this events, shows people think enforcement is too week and it needs to be weak and emphasized in cases and there are other polls showing people are puzzled. They understand why violent street crime has been a prior y priority. I dont think they realize how many people are locked up for nonViolent Crimes. But they dont understand why bankers have seamingly seemingly walk ed away. There was a guy who rigged the wire order and wasnt going to be prosecuted. It with a too complicated and they couldnt figure out what to do about it. It is true the double standard is starting to make local news and i will tell you something if you have not heard about it you will be surprised. There are cases where drivers of defective cars that had fatal crashes. One a toyota and one gm car. Were prosecuted for reckless driving. And one guy got an eightyear jail term and served two years until toyota said we think that car was having a sudden acceleration problem. So we have a circumstances where lawmakers have a defective they cover over for years, sign huge settlements for the government, but in the mean time the average consumer for brought the car in good faith, has his conduct criminalized because the defective car causes an accident. It is disgusting. I would like to move to more pragmatic arguments. This may be controversial. I would really like to hear what you think about it. But my argument is we need a completely different preach to the arm that is being caused because Government Agencies are on their back foot. There is rampant regulatory dysfunction because they are underfunded, grossly underfunded, they have laws that are outdated and no chance of having them updated. As an example, you get a heavier penalty if you harass a wild borough in a state park than if you kill a worker through gross negligence. Laws are outdated. And finally the bureaucrats are kicked up over the head by the conservatives who have consi consiste consistently woo want to give the message everyone in the government is incompetent. So the agencies dont feel like they have a lot of backing. And they have, epa, cut its enforcement. Slashed it. It was one of the first things to go to balance the budget. If i were over there, ha, that is one of the things i would not touch until the last minute. We have agencies that have single issue epa is working on Climate Change and not on much else unfortunately. Osha seems to have abandoned all rulemaking. The fda has been virtually defunded on food safety. They dont have the money to implement new laws. And mitsa was absolutely looked as if it couldnt muster itself to even understand what was going on with some of the more sophisticated problems. It took plaintiff lawyers, thank you plaintiff lawyers, to discover the ignition switch was switched out. Gm kept it a secret so the people with the cobalt from earlier years were driving around with switches they knew were dangerous. Too many companies, large and small, a galloping across the tundra without any fear of being caught or prosecuted. This is a bad situation and something we need a new approach to address and to really change. If we go up to capitol hill, there is many veteran lobbyist here going up to capitol hill saying please give the agencies more money, you know what kind of reaction that gets. So it is not going to get better any time soon. And if we can find a way to advocatie for a sharp remedy. A remedy that is appropriately harsh in the right cases, i think it will have a lot of resina resinate with people who have a perception that the government is not protecting them and companies are only about the bottom line and dont care about their customers. My third argument is that we can make big progress here because changes and reaches already started. With that rob mentioned some of these but i just want to point out for people who may not have followed it, no reason you should, i am obsessed, doesnt mean you have to be. That is the whole point. One of the have beens is six notable prosecutions in five states that show federal prosecutors are becoming far more aggressive on health and safety. The bp company men in charge of the rig before the blowout and made an absolutely puzzling unusual and bad decision about a test result that they got in, without consulting with any of the engineers onshore, have been charged and will go to trial in the fall. At the Peanut Corporation of america that shipped out peanut paste with salmonella killed nine and made many sick. They have been convicted of felonys and sentenced on september 26th. New england com pound center has been charged with racketeering with a core offense of seconddegree murder of the 64 people who received these injections, got meningitis and died. 741 people is still struggling with the aftermath of the disease. Two of the pharmacy workers have been charged with deliberately ignoring test showing the clean rooms at the facility were infested with bacteria and fungus, and didnt do industry written standard tests, who were sending out medicine when only supposed to send it out to specific patients. They were sending it to list of name including mickey mouse and jesus christ. And they will go to trial, it is predicted in april. Massy energy, which sponsors the mine collapse that killed 29 minors, the worst tragedy in decades, the ceo, don blankenship, through cheering, people were calling every day the u. S. Attorneys Office Asking if he was going to indict blankenship. He finally did. If you read the indictment you will be amazed at the things the man was saying in writing and more interesting his Senior Executives wrote in the notes. They were getting production reports every 30 minute from the executive. Freedom industries. The people that ran the tank farm that had the leak that put an unpronounceable chemical that hasnt tested in the water supply in West Virginia has been charged and many pled guilty. The jenson brothers, perhaps the most sympatheting, sold cantaloupe infested with listeria. They have convinced the industry, thank goodness, that if you hurt people and people get sick off the food you send out you can face criminal charges. There are some common characteristics here i want to run through. My ultimate goal is to make these kinds of behaviors a component of the guilty mind you need to have to be prosecuted for a crime. They are very wide spread. You see them when you look deeply in the the incidents and there have been thousands of pages of objective reports that have been written about each incident. You look into them and you can gather a few threads in your hand. Everyone had ample warning they were doing something wrong because the regulators were buzzing around them. Massi energy, the Upper Big Branch mine was evacuated two times in the three weeks leading up to the explosion that killed the 29 men. They had hundreds of violations pending for the exact practice that caused the explosion but they persisted, appealed them and put them off. There is a relentless demand that people work harder and faster. Texas refinery under george bush, 15 people killed, the workers in charge of the unit that caused the explosion had been working 12 hour shifts for 29 straight days. This is common. Stove pipe management that has different responsibilities assigned, i am not sure if deliberate but effective. So no body knows the whole picture. Closely related to that, a system that discourages reporting any bad news. At the mine when the miners were saying the ventilation system wasnt working they were told they have kids they needed to feed so why dont they be quite or they will not be around on the job. The normalization of deviance is another. This is when people see the systems are failing, they are problems, they are near misses mounting up, but they ration rationalize it saying the risks are not that serious, we can accommodate this, as looping as are aware of this is it is okay and talk themselves into a group thing that is blind to what the ramifications of what could happen are. So, one last one is a lab with paper tigers. Big corporations have reams of papers. Manuals, directives, things put on the lunch room bulletin board. There is no so much of it is that is ignored, no body is aware of it, and there is no system for enforcing it. It is not done in the way the average blue Collar Worker can understand. That is very ambitious for me to say. If there were other professors of criminal law here they would be falling off their chairs at the idea that this kind of behavior should demonstrate guilty mind and that is largely part of the problem because there is this kind of refusal to say that when circumstances get worse and worse it becomes clearer and clearer that something dangerous is going on. The only people considered responsible are the ones standing there five minutes before the accident occurs and there is plenty of room in the law as i explain it, excessive length in the book, for making the argument when you make these chains they go back weeks months and those people are equally responsible if they ignore what happened and what the risks are. I will also say and this is something my colleagues, many of them would laugh about, we dont need new laws. We will not get them. That is sort of a problem. But we dont need them. Existing law has room for creative prosecutors, daring prosecutors, to bring these kinds of cases and be successful. We were talking before about the prosecutors and why they are afraid to bring creative cases and part of the reason is they absolutely hate to lose. If you talk to any of them they will admit this as their first point out of the block. The other problem is there isnt anybody pressing them in a concerted way to make charges supporting them to do it. Sometimes a prosecutor see the light about this kind of thing. One example is last week, the new York Attorney general announced he was going to prosecute the owners of a papa johns change that had stolen employees wages. Literally approperated what they were supposed to be paying the line workers and make their taxes fraudulent to cover tup. Standing by his side was the head of the department of wage labor and it was a wonderful example of the partnership that can go on between state and local prosecutors who have more flexible ways of approaching the problems than federal officials. But i dont overlook the Justice Department either. They are critical to the whole thing. Very important as we advocate and push and this is one of the reasons i am concerned and interested in these manager policies. These are not policies made at the line worker level. Making them central. You should, you would be really surprised by some of the things that go on and how obvious it should be that peoples lives are in danger. I want to say that we have already begun work thanks to the Public Welfare foundation, we actually are working on trying to make connections with state and local prosecutor and encourage criminal prosecution. One of the cases that were aware of and talking with the activists in new york, is a case routine Case Construction Company send a bunch of workers and without checking where the loadbearing walls are of the car dealership that they want to demolish. The workers go in and start tearing it down, course the loadbearing wall is the first thing the hammer at and the whole thing collapses in a manner skilled. Thats the kind of think these cases go from simple, to complicated but they really are found that people are put in these types of positions and i suggest you see the criminal laws for that answer. [applause]. You dont have to read the thousands of pages because she read them all and wrote a great book about it, so we can just buy the book. The first thing i would say is prosecutors are human beings too, rena mentioned that what they hate doing is losing, they had to go to trial and lose, the great thing about this book and a bunch of other books that have been written now is that its going to give them space to act. Renas book is like a roadmap, if i want to bring this case, how do i do it. So the first thing is that this book is a cornerstone for what i call a new wave movement, its in the context of a group of citizen academic reporters and activists who are moving together in the first time in probably 20 years. We were talking earlier, before we came here about the books that were written about corporate crime. Rob and i were writing columns about it that wound up in books, there is a lot being written. Our first interview ever, we do a question answer was Rudy Giuliani, y Rudy Giuliani . He was a republican, was a republican, u. S. Attorney in new york, criminally prosecuting people for corporate crime as a launching pad for becoming mayor of new york. The prosecutor rena mentioned in indiana prosecuted the Motor Company for homicide. Conservative, approached approached by the families of the dead teenage girl and there is a book, an article written by mike dolly that reprinted the memo when ford was saying hey if we recall this how much would it cost to bring back the cars and fix them . And on the other side of the Balance Sheet how much is a life worth . So once the Movement Starts its not about left, right or democrat, republican its about human values and justice. So this is the cornerstone book and the movement. The citizen scholars, lets look at a few of them brandon garrett, wrote a book called too big for jail. Duke University Professor is coming out with a book called capital offense