Getting Help With Law Enforcement's "Sliding Scale"
“Merely” civil and regulatory sanctions can, moreover, be literally devastating...
This is no accident. It is, in fact, an expressed “General Principle” among the directives given to federal prosecutors that, when deciding whether to bring criminal charges against a corporation, (or whether, instead, to initiate a civil or regulatory enforcement action), the prosecutor is first to decide the course of action that will best fulfill the “primary goals” of “deterrence, punishment, and retribution.”
...Either way — whether the alleged wrongdoer is threatened with criminal prosecution, or “only” with a civil enforcement action — the intended outcome is, by design, the same: the imposition of a penalty that is sufficiently severe to “deter, punish, and rehabilitate.”
...This concept simply does not depend on whether the threat faced is individual or corporate, or whether it is criminal or civil.