Why Not Jail?

Rena Steinzor is a Professor of Law at the University of Maryland's Francis King Carey School of Law. She is the president of the Center for Progressive Reform (www.progressivereform.org), a think tank composed of sixty working academics from universities across the country that is a nationally recognized source of research and opinion on public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment. Steinzor's publications include Mother Earth and Uncle Sam: How Pollution and Hollow Government Hurt our Kids (2007), The People's Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public: Special Interests, Government, and Threats to Health, Safety, and the Environment (with Sidney Shapiro, 2010) and Rescuing Science from Politics (co-edited with Wendy Wagner, 2006).

• Part I. The Status Quo: 1. Regulatory dysfunction; 2. White-collar crime today; 3. Cons and pros; Part II. The Lessons of Catastrophe: 4. Occupational disasters; 5. Environmental disaster; 6. Public health; Part III. Solutions: 7. A guilty mind; 8. Deferred prosecution agreements.

'Rena Steinzor's powerful and compelling Why Not Jail? Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction argues for criminal prosecution of both corporations and corporate executives … The core of her book is a close examination of a series of disasters - the BP oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, the Massey mine collapse, the contaminated drugs from the New England Compounding Center - showing that while unintentional, each of these industrial catastrophes was the direct result of corporate malfeasance, exactly the circumstance that should be punished criminally.' Robert Weissman, Public Citizen News