Crimes of the Powerful Flashcards
How does Sutherland define White Collar Crime?
A crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation
What two types of crime does Sutherland’s definition fail to distinguish between?
Occupational Crime: committed by employees for own personal gain against the company (e.g. embezzlement)
Corporate Crime: committed by employees for their organisation in pursuit of its goals (e.g. deliberately miss-selling product to inc. company profits)
What are the Explanations of Corporate crime?
Strain theory (Merton)
Differential Association (Sutherland)
Labelling Theory
Marxism
How does Strain theory explain corporate crime?
If a company can’t achieve it’s goal of maximising profits by legal means, it may employ illegal ones instead
(when business conditions and profitability are strained companies may be tempted to break the law)
How is Strain theory an incomplete explanation of corporate crime?
Doesn’t explain crime in non-profit making state agencies like the police, army or civil service e.g. health and safety crimes in formerly communist regimes
How does Sutherland’s Differential Association explain crime?
crime is behaviour learned from others in a social context, the less we associate with people with attitudes that favour the law and more we spend time w/ people with deviant attitudes, the more likely we deviate ourselves
e.g. if company culture normalises committing crimes to achieve corporate goals, employees will be socialised into this criminality (link to Matza’s Neutralisation techniques)
How does labelling theory explain corporate crime?
Whether something counts as a crime depends on its label. WC actions are more likely to be defined as criminal , businesses and professionals have the power to avoid labelling through hiring expensive lawyers and accountants
How does marxism explain corporate crime?
corporate crime is just the result of the normal functioning of capitalism as it is criminogenic (inevitably causes harm, e.g. deaths of employees and consumers)
Box: capitalism has created a ‘mystification’> spread ideology that corporate crime is less widespread or harmful than WC crime by only prosecuting some crimes
What is a general criticism of these explanations for corporate crime?
Law abiding can sometimes be more profitable
Braithwaite: US pharmaceutical companies complied w FDA regulations to get their products licensed> then were able to sell their product’s to poorer countries with less strict regulations and testing facilities that relied on the FDA as a guarantee of quality
(could maximise their profits by potentially selling faulty or poor quality batches)
Why is the scale of corporate crime so large?
do more harm than ordinary or street crime like theft or burglary
e.g. the cost of white-collar crimes in the USA are over 10x that of ordinary crimes
it is more widespread, routine and pervasive
e.g. UK firm Ernst and Young tax avoidance, could have cost the taxpayer £300m p/y
What does Tombs say about the scale of corporate crime?
it has enormous costs: physical (death and injury), environmental (pollution-e.g. union carbide) and economic
What does Sutherland say about the scale of corporate crime?
its a greater threat than WC street crime because it promotes cynicism and distrust of basic social institutions (undermines society)
What are the 5 types of corporate crime?
Financial crimes
Crimes against consumers
Crimes against employees
Crimes against the environment
State-Corporate Crime
What are financial crimes?
Tax evasion, bribery, money-laundering etc
Victims: other companies, shareholders, taxpayers and governments
What are Crimes against Consumers?
False labelling, selling unfit goods
e.g. Horsemeat Scandal (2013) Tesco beef products contained high percentage of horse meat
What are Crimes against Employees?
Sexual and racial discrimination, violation of wage laws, health and safety etc
Tombs (2013) : up to 1,100 work related deaths per year involve employers breaking the law
What are Crimes against the Environment?
Illegal pollution of air, water and land
e.g., average of 825 sewage spills per day in 2022 (recent sewage spills scandals) not all are illegal but a portion of it is
Labour has said the government is allowing our rivers to be treated like open sewers
What are State-Corporate crimes?
harm committed when gov institutions and businesses cooperate to achieve their goals
e.g. private companies contracted to the US military have been accused of involvement in the torture of detainees during the American occupation of Iraq
What 5 things make corporate crime invisible?
The media
Lack of political will
Complex crimes
De-Labelling
Under reporting
How does the media make corporate crime invisible?
Limited coverage on it, reinforcing the idea crime is a WC phenomenon
Corporate crime isn’t real crime just ‘technical issues’ e.g. embezzlement>accounting irregularities
How does the lack of political will make corporate crime invisible?
Politicians talking about tough on crime usually mean street crime
e.g British Crime Survey asks about ordinary crime not corporate
How does the complexity of corporate crime make it invisible?
Law enforcement agencies often underfunded and understaffed, don’t have the resources to investigate effectively
How has de-labelling made corporate crime invisible?
they are often defined as civil not criminal, even when they are criminal cases penalties are often fines rather than jail
How does under-reporting make corporate crime invisible?
Individuals might be unaware they’re victims e.g. you might not know you’ve been illegally tricked into buying the wrong mortgage
Even when they are aware they might feel powerless against a big organisation and so don’t report the offence
