alt Hacker NewsThe countries who jail CEOs who due “societal damage” as a fuzzy cultural concept, as opposed to jailing CEOs according to the law, are not legal systems you want to imitate.
The US does jail CEOs who commit crimes. Social media just has a short memory for topics like Worldcom, Enron, Tyco, or even recent topics like Theranos and FTX.
You may also have your personal list of “societal damages” that you believe should result in people being jailed despite not having committed crimes, but I guarantee your list doesn’t match everyone else’s list. You wouldn’t be happy when the list of “societal damages” started extending to things like using a VPN or trying to be anonymous on the internet, but for many people who get to government positions it most definitely would!
Executives mostly get jailed when there is large media attention + the executive was foolish enough to leave evidence pointing straight at them. For every case where an executive is jailed, there are 100 other cases where they aren't. And that is just in the overt "breaking the law cases".
Even more incredible damage has been in us losing the laws that protect us in the first place. For nigh on 40 years thanks to neoliberal economists influencing policy we have been relaxing corporate and monetary regulation.
This has already provided great gifts to the world, such as enabling the fraud that led to the 2008 housing crisis (who was jailed again?).
When as a country you decide that punishing bad corporate behaviour is a non starter, you get the predictable consequences of increasing, not decreasing bad corporate behaviour.