The Supreme Court saw it differently. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the court said that the law keeping corporations out of our politics violated freedom of speech under the First Amendment.

But the court didn’t pause to think about corporate crime. As we’ve seen since the financial crisis, corporate crime can cause more harm than street crime. Here, however, the fortunes of street criminals and corporate criminals diverge. People convicted of felonies go to prison for years. Corporations charged with felonies usually negotiate a “deferred prosecution agreement,” pay a fine (which comes out of shareholders’ money), and then get right back to business. And increasingly, that business includes working the system to change the rules in their favor.

We don’t have complete information on how much cash corporate criminals are injecting into our political system, because of weak disclosure laws that allow corporations to spend money directly, or give it to shadowy “dark money” groups, out of the public eye. But we do know some things.