> As I understand it, if a company actually goes to trial and is convicted, they are not allowed to operate anymore, hence the plea deals and fines.
This isn't true (a counterexample: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/pge-found-guilty-obstru... ). The reason for plea deals is that neither prosecutors nor defendants typically want to go to court and have a jury trial with an essentially random high-stakes outcome. Both sides usually want to reach an acceptable compromise.
Disbandment also means very little from a punitive perspective, unless you consider disbandment to include seizure of the company's assets. Disbandment is unfavourable because it destroys the value embodied by the company's association: it's customer relationships / brand value, its employee relationships, etc. The cases where disbandment or breakup makes sense are where that association is bad for the rest of society, such as monopolies (e.g. AT&T's antitrust settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T)
I am quite a bit more cynical and see these DPAs as a way for the corporation to be absolved of the nebulous liability that comes from "We did bad stuff, we're still waiting to see if anyone notices" with a slap on the wrists. A DPA seems like literally the closest you can get to pardoning without actually slapping the corporation on the back and publicly saying "Good job buddy, do some more of that"
A measure of how unjust our culture is is whether crimes that violate these DPAs go unpunished or not... compared to first time drug offenders that get decades behind bars for possession.
This isn't true (a counterexample: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/pge-found-guilty-obstru... ). The reason for plea deals is that neither prosecutors nor defendants typically want to go to court and have a jury trial with an essentially random high-stakes outcome. Both sides usually want to reach an acceptable compromise.
Disbandment also means very little from a punitive perspective, unless you consider disbandment to include seizure of the company's assets. Disbandment is unfavourable because it destroys the value embodied by the company's association: it's customer relationships / brand value, its employee relationships, etc. The cases where disbandment or breakup makes sense are where that association is bad for the rest of society, such as monopolies (e.g. AT&T's antitrust settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T)