On April 20, 2010, an explosion on an oil rig off the coast of New Orleans called the Deepwater Horizon caused a continuous leak of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico until it was plugged about four months later. In addition to the 11 people killed by the initial explosion, the leaking oil (estimated at 4.9 million barrels) caused the largest, single, man-made environmental disaster in human history. 4.9 million barrels is impossible to comprehend—the oil slick visible from satellite images was roughly one-tenth the size of the entire state of Louisiana.

Multiple investigations were performed in response to the Deepwater Horizon Spill. The general conclusion was that the explosion was caused by defective equipment, overworked employees and a lax safety culture. And yet, despite British Petroleum (BP) being held responsible for billions of dollars in damages and cleanup, there were no criminal consequences for its executives. Now, why exactly is that? Well, a big reason is that the organizational structure of corporations is well-suited, perhaps even designed, to obscure individual decisions and collectivize responsibility. A significant amount of legal history regarding corporations has involved defining their personhood, conferring on them the rights that humans have and cementing this collectivization of responsibility.

The rule of law binds individuals—we have a strong incentive not to break the law because we fear legal punishment. But if you knew that no matter what you did at your job, the worst thing that could happen to you is having to shuffle around some of the corporation’s money, and possibly being deposed by the board of directors with a massive golden parachute, where’s the justice?

We’ve seen that imprisoning bad actors can be a major boon to industries that have trustability problems. For example, the conviction and imprisonment of cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was a sobering wake-up call to the dangers of absolute belief in the blockchain, even though many cryptocurrency evangelists chose to hit the snooze button. But the point is, Sam Bankman-Fried’s prosecution was a critical step in demonstrating that there are serious consequences for malfeasance in crypto while calibrating the public’s trust in what kind of behavior they should expect from executives.

Public confidence is the key here. We currently live in times of unprecedented distrust in institutions. Conspiracy theories are now mainstream Republican talking points that even infect Democrats. Much of this distrust is manufactured by those deliberately trying to weaken, or even destroy, these institutions. Yet, no matter where you look, you’ll always find a tiny, little kernel of truth in even the most deranged conspiracies. Take, for example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s (FRK Jr.) Make America Healthy Again movement, which is driven in no small part by a general distrust of the American food and medical industries. RFK’s anti-vaccine beliefs are obviously insane, but part of why people support them is because they’ve already been primed to believe that Big Pharma is bad by actual cases of unpunished wrongdoing.

The biggest case would be the Sackler family, who are described as the worst drug dealers in history and are largely responsible for the opioid epidemic today. They’ve been sued for their willful marketing of horribly addictive and harmful drugs many times over. Not a single one of them has faced conviction. Can we blame people for instinctively agreeing with anyone who says that Big Pharma is out to get you when people like the Sacklers are still walking free?

Then there’s the government itself, which arguably has the worst case of public distrust. Republicans are openly contemptuous of the rule of law itself, so there’s not much point in complaining that they don’t hold each other accountable. But Democrats have not properly upheld the rule of law. It’s understandable why: Republicans have spent years talking about “weaponizing the justice system” against freedom-loving patriots, and some Democrats are worried about looking like they’d rather imprison their opponents than fight them fairly. But to accept that framing is to betray the American people. Can we really believe that Democrats care about saving democracy when they won’t even punish the people who try to destroy it? Under a very basic reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, Republican politicians who supported the Jan. 6 insurrection could easily be barred from holding office, and that’s a lenient punishment compared to what they deserve. Merrick Garland, the attorney general under Joe Biden, naively believed that imprisoning Republican politicians was counterproductive because voters would surely reject Donald Trump. But it’s the other way around. Citizens will only reject political corruption when it’s actually taken seriously. In an administration as corrupt as this one, if the Watergate Scandal happened again, it’d just be another Tuesday.

Obviously, just locking up all the bad actors is not a substitute for actually fixing the systems that were broken enough to reward them, but it’s a critical step in that process. We apply a law-and-order mentality to crimes among the poor all the time, even though their decision-making ability is often hampered by stress, lack of education and economic pressure. But when rich and powerful people steal money or power from the American people, while being well-educated and rational enough to know that they shouldn’t, why don’t we punish those crimes twice over? Crimes committed by powerful people will never end until it is made clear to them forcefully that such behavior is unacceptable.