Hidden Ugliness in Crime

So you lose your loved one to a serial killer. Maybe it was even your child. You might like to attend the trial and face down the monster. Oh, wait, your employer, a large corporation with plenty of padding, can't spare you for even a day. Maybe you can at least go the day he is sentenced. You need to be present for this moment. You need it.

So you get docked a day's pay.

Hey, CEOs and Boards of Directors, one day you might find yourself in the line of fire. Then you will know first hand how important it is to see who did it and what a jury decides to do with him. We are all in this together, folks. If we got each other's backs once in awhile, would the bottom line really suffer?

Doing these books, going far beyond the headlines, has shown me that victims of crimes pay forever, in countless ways. Can't an HR director draft a rule for the handbook that says "If you've been a victim of crime, we think you've suffered plenty. Attend the sentencing. We got it covered." All these companies that tout what great corporate citizens they are, I'd love to see it in their soft focus ads how often they fire victims of crime while recovering from their wounds or push them into foreclosure because they got docked when they couldn't keep themselves away from seeing their child's killer condemned by society and formally declared to be unfit for society.