CRIMES OF THE POWERFUL Flashcards
1
Q
Crimes of the powerful
A
- Crimes committed by people who are in relatively strong legitimate economic and political positions in society
2
Q
Pearce and Tombs, 2003
A
- Define corporate crime as any illegal act or omission that is the deliberate decision or culpable negligence by a legitimate business organisation and that is intended to benefit the business.
3
Q
White collar crime
A
- Non-violent, financial crimes committed for individual financial benefit through deceptive means e.g. embezzlement, money laundering and fraud.
4
Q
Corporate crime
A
- The illegal actions of a corporation or people acting on its behalf.
- The company in question does not need to be aware of (or condone) such criminal activity but often are.
5
Q
Types of corporate crime
A
- Financial crime: tax evasion, money laundering and illegal accounting, victims of which are often other companies, shareholders and taxpayers.
- Crime against consumers: false labelling and the selling of misfit goods e.g. a french company sold breast implants filled with dangerous industrial silicone rather than the more expensive medical silicone .
- Crimes against employers: sexual and racial discrimination, violations of wage laws or health and safety laws. Tombs (2013) calculated that up to 1100 word-related deaths a year involve employers breaking the law - more than the annual total of homicides.
- Crimes against the environment: illegal pollution of air, water and land, such as toxic waste dumping e.g. Volkswagen.
- State-corporate crimes: the harms committed when govt. institutions and businesses cooperate to pursue goals.
6
Q
Example of corporate crime (env.)
A
- The Volkswagen emissions scandal (2015) where software was designed to significantly lower cars’ emissions readings, making these cars appear to out-perform their competitors. The emission level was actually 40x higher than the permissible level.
- The Grenfell Tower fire was also argued to be corporate manslaughter due to the unambiguous failures contributed to the tragedy
7
Q
Tombs 2013
A
Corporate crimes have enormous costs:
- Physical - deaths, injuries and illnesses
- Economic - for the consumers, workers, taxpayers and government
- Environmental - green crimes including toxic waste dumping
8
Q
State-corporate crimes
A
- This is an increasingly important area because private companies now work alongside the government in many areas e.g. in marketised or privatised public services such as education winning armaments contracts with foreign governments, and the ‘war on terror’.
- For example, private companies contracted to the US military have been accused of involvements in the torture of detainees during the American occupation of Iraq.
9
Q
Abuse of trust
A
- High-status professionals occupy positions of trust and respectability; this trust can be abused.
- Accountants and lawyers can be employed by criminal organisations, for example to launder criminal funds into legitimate businesses.
- The respected status, expertise and autonomy of health professionals also afford scope for criminal activity e.g. in the US many fraudulent claims to insurance companies for treatments that have not actually been performed.
- This is also exemplified by the case of Harold Shipman, a doctor convicted of the murder of 15 of his patients, but over the course of 23yrs, he is believed to have murdered at least another 200.
10
Q
Sutherland (abuse of trust)
A
- This opportunity to abuse trust makes white-collar crime a great threat to society than ‘working-class street crime’ because it promotes cynicism and distrust of basic social institutions and undermines the fabric of society.
11
Q
Hughes and Langan (2001):
The Invisibility of White-Collar Crime
A
- White-collar crime is often treated differently by the public, courts, police because of 4 main factors:
- Low visibility - street crimes and their consequences are highly visible, whereas white collar crimes are largely hidden from the public gaze. When they are detected, it is hard to pinpoint blame.
- Complexity - large scale frauds are highly complex operations. They are hard to unravel and hard to allocate blame. They involve different companies, various bank accounts, a multitude of transactions and variety of individuals who are aware of what’s going on. It takes teams of experts years to uncover the truth.
- Diffusion of responsibility - responsibility for corporate crime is often diffused - widely spread. It is difficult to allocate blame to particular individuals.
- Diffusion of victimisation - many white collar crimes are described as ‘crimes without victims’. In many cases, there is no obvious victim (which would be obvious in a murder or robbery). However, there are victims - they’re just more spread out (environmental pollution affects many people). We all have to pay for white collar crime - higher prices, higher insurance premiums and taxes etc.
12
Q
The Invisibility of Corporate Crime
A
- Compared to other forms of crime, corporate crime has a lower rate of detection and prosecution and more lenient punishments and even when visible they are often not seen as ‘real’ crime at all. Reasons:
- The media give very little coverage to corporate crime or describe it in sanitised language, as technical infringements rather than real crime. E.G. embezzlement = accounting irregularities and deaths at work = accidents rather than employers’ negligence or cost-cutting.
- De-labelling: CC is consistently filtered out from the process of criminalisation. Offenses are often defined as civil not criminal and even in criminal cases penalties are often fines rather than jail.
- Lack of political will to tackle CC: home office surveys do not investigate CC. Many corporate crimes are dealt with by regulating bodies rather than the criminal justice system (e.g. trading standards). They are more likely to give ‘official warnings’ than to pursue prosecutions.
- In cases of bribery/corruption, both parties involved may see themselves as gaining from the arrangement. Both face prosecution if caught, so neither is likely to report the offence.
- A lot of the time, members of the public lack expertise to realise they are being misled. So detection/prosecution is often left to a government agency which rarely has the finances to bring more than a few cases to court.
- In the case of professionals, like doctors and lawyers, ‘misconduct’ is usually dealt with by professional associations like The British Medical Association - only the most serious cases result in prosecution.
13
Q
The Invisibility of Corporate Crime
EV.
A
+ Due to lack of political will, the complexity of corporate crime, de-labelling and the under-reporting of corporate crime, crimes of the powerful are relatively invisible.
- However, since the financial crisis of 2008, the activities of a range of different people may have made crime more visible. For example, campaigns have been made against corporate tax avoidance such as Occupy and UK Uncut. There are also investigative journalists who explore and expose this further to the public. This encourages the dialogue surrounding this crime. Many whistle-blowers inside the companies have recently also drawn attention to the matter. The media also play a role in making corporate crime more visible (e.g. adverts for compensation claims over pensions mis-sellings).
14
Q
Explanations of corporate crime
A
- Strain theory: companies breaking the law to achieve max profit
- Capitalism creates mystification
- Selective law-enforcement
- Ruling class can avoid labelling
15
Q
StT to CC
Box, 1983
A
- Capitalism has successfully created ‘mystification’ i.e it has spread the ideology that corporate crime is less widespread or harmful than WC crime.
- Capitalism’s control of the state means that it is able to avoid making or enforcing laws that conflict with its interests. While some corporate crime is prosecuted, this only ever the tip of the iceberg.
- Pearce argues that this sustains the illusion that it is the exception rather than the norm, and thus avoids causing a crisis of legitimacy for capitalism.
- Employs the functionalist the functionalist argument of strain theory to explain corporate crime.
- Argues that if a company cannot achieve its goal of maximising profit by legal means, it may employ illegal ones instead. Thus, when business conditions become more difficult and profitability is squeezed, companies may be tempted to break the law. (Strain theory)
- Sees corporations as criminogenic because if they find that legitimate opportunities for profit are blocked, they will resort to illegal techniques aimed at competitors, consumers or the public. Companies comply with the law only if they see it enforced strictly; where effective controls are lacking (developing countries), capitalism shows its true face, selling unsafe products, paying low wages for work in dangerous conditions etc.
