Crimes Of The Powerful

Question 1

What does Tombs say about corporate crime?

Answer 1

It has enormous costs eg physical (deaths, illness), environmental and economic

Question 2

Give examples of financial crimes and the potential victims of it

Answer 2

eg tax evasion and money laundering

Victims include taxpayers and gov

Question 3

Give an example of a crime against consumers

Answer 3

False labelling

Question 4

Give an example of crimes against employees. What did Palmer find?

Answer 4

Violations of wage laws, racial discrimination

Palmer- occupational diseases cause 50 000 deaths per yr in UK

Question 5

Give an example of crimes against the environment

Answer 5

Illegal pollution of air, land and water like toxic waste dumping

Question 6

Invisibilty of corporate crime: the media

Answer 6

Very limited coverage on it which reinforces the stereotypr that it is solely a WC phenomeonon

Describes corporate crime using sanitised language like defrauding customers is ‘misspelling’

Question 7

Invisibilty of corporate crime: lack of political will to tackle it. Give an example

Answer 7

Rhetoric of being ‘tough on crime’ is focused on street crime eg the Home Office uses crime surveys to find out the extent of street crime, not corporate crimr

Question 8

Invisibiltiy of corporate crime: under reporting

Answer 8

People often do not view it as a real crime or may feel powerless against a large corporation

Many do not know they have been victims

Question 9

Explanations of corporate crime: strai n theory (Box)

Use Clinard and Yeager’s findings

Answer 9

(Box) If a company cannot achieve its goals of maximising profits by legal means, they may turn to illegal means

They found that law violations by large companies increased as financial performance deteriorated suggesting a willingness to innovate

Question 10

Explanations of corporate crime: Marxism

Answer 10

Inevitable because capitalism is criminogenic- the aim to maximise profits inevitably leads to harm

(Box) ‘Mystification’ means that people believe it is less harmful than what it actually is

Question 11

Criticism of Marxism’s explanation (Nelken)

Answer 11

Overpredicts the amount of business crime

Nelken- it is unrealistic that all companies would commit corporate crime because they must maintain goodwill with other companies