Globalisation And Crime Flashcards
Global criminal economy
Held et al suggest, there has also been a globalisation of crime - an increasing interconnectedness of crime across national borders. This has brought about the spread of transnational organised crime.
Globalisation creates new opportunities for crime, new means of committing crime and new offences, such as various cyber-crimes.
As a result of globalisation, Manuel Castells (1998) argues, there is now a global criminal economy worth over £1 trillion per annum.
Forms of the global criminal economy
Arms trafficking to illegal regimes, guerilla groups and
terrorists.
• Trafficking in nuclear materials, especially from the former communist countries.
• Smuggling of illegal immigrants, for example, the Chinese Triads make an estimated $2.5 bilion annualy.
• Trafficking in women and children, often linked to prostitution or slavery. Up to half a million people are trafficked to Western Europe annually.
° Sex tourism, where Westerners travel to poorer countries for sex, sometimes involving minors.
Trafficking in body parts for organ transplants in rich countries. An estimated 2,000 organs annually are taken from condemned or executed criminals in China.
• Cyber-crimes such as identity theft and child pornography.
• Green crimes that damage the environment, such as illegal dumping of toxic waste in poorer countries.
• International terrorism Much terrorism is now based on ideological links made via the Internet and other ICT, rather than on local territorial links as in the past.
• Smuggling of legal goods, such as alcohol and tobacco, to evade taxes, and of stolen goods, such as cars, to sell in foreign markets.
• Trafficking in cultural artefacts and works of art, sometimes having first been stolen to order.
• Trafficking in endangered species or their body parts, for example to produce traditional remedies.
• The drugs trade worth an estimated $300-400 billion annually at street prices.
• Money laundering of the profits from organised crime, estimated at up to $1.5 trillion per year.
Demand and supply of the global criminal economy
The global criminal economy has both a demand side and a supply side. Part of the reason for the scale of transnational organised crime is the demand for its products and services in the rich West. However, the global criminal economy could not function without a supply side that provides the source of the drugs, sex workers and other goods and services demanded in the West.
what is the suplly part of the global crime economy linked to
This supply is linked to the globalisation process. For example, poor, drugs-producing countries such as Colombia, Peru and Afghanistan have large populations of impoverished peasants. For these groups, drug cultivation is an attractive option that requires little investment in technology and commands high prices compared with traditional crops. In Colombia, for instance, an estimated 20% of the population depends on cocaine production for their livelihood, and cocaine outsells all Colombia’s other exports combined. To understand drug crime, we cannot confine our attention merely to the countries where the drugs are consumed.
Why has global crime increased
New Opportunities for Crime
* Improved communication/ better transport has opened up new sources and markets
• Arms trafficking sex tourism, trafficking in body parts, money launderine
* 2 New Means of Committing ‘old’ Crime
* Improved communications/ better transport/ new technology has open up news ways to traffic human beings, smuggle flegal immigrants, smuggling.
drug trafficking
• 3 New Offences
* New technolosy has created new offences such cyber crime and some green crime, trafficking in nuciear weapons
Had globalisation caused crime to increase
New Technology
- Develooments such as the internet/satellites/ mobile phones have facilitated the develooment of new crimes as well as improving the efficiency of ‘old’ crimes
- Better Transport
* Improved interconnectivity has opened up sources of goods/ people and connected them with the markets for the criminal enterprise
- New Interconnectedness
- Enables the more criminal gangs/ organisations to operate more efficientiy. It has also increased tensions between groups which may have increased terrorism
* More Media
* increasing sense of relative deprivation ad marginalisation and thus stimulates the market for goods AND the willingness to turn to crime to achieve them
* Lack of Global Policing
- The global scale of crime is so huge that it is impossible to effectively police
Global risk consciousness
Globalisation creates new insecurities and produces a new mentality of ‘risk consciousness’ in which risk is seen as global rather than tied to particular places. For example, the increased movement of people, as economic migrants seeking work or as asylum seekers fleeing persecution, has given rise to anxieties among populations in Western countries about the risks of crime and disorder and the need to protect their borders
Much of our knowledge about risks comes from the media, which often give an exaggerated view of the dangers we face.
In the case of immigration, the media create moral panics about the supposed ‘threat’, often fuelled by politicians. Negative coverage of immigrants - portrayed as terrorists or as scroungers
‘flooding’ the country - has led to hate crimes against minorities the UK.
One result is the intensification of social control at the national level. The UK has toughened its border control regulations, for example fining airlines if they bring in undocumented passengers.
Marxist interpretations of global crime sociologist
Taylor
Marxism and global crime
Taylor (1997)
• Globalisation has allowed the international free market to create more inequality and rising crime
globalisation, capitalism and crime factors
- globalisation has led to changes in the pattern and extent of crime. By giving free rein to market forces, globalisation has created greater inequality and rising crime.
- Globalisation has created crime at both ends of the social spectrum.
- All these factors create insecurity and widening inequalities that encourage people, especially the poor, to turn to crime.
- The lack of legitimate job opportunities destroys self-respect and drives the unemployed to look for illegitimate ones
- At the same time, globalisation also creates criminal opportunities on a grand scale for elite groups
- Globalisation has also led to new patterns of employment, which have created new opportunities for crime.
Taylor’s theory is useful in linking global trends in the capitalist economy to changes in the pattern of crime.
However, it does not adequately explain how the changes make people behave in criminal ways. For example, not all poor people turn to crime.
globalisation, capitalism and crime - patterns of crime
Writing from a socialist perspective, lan Taylor (1997) argues that globalisation has led to changes in the pattern and extent of crime. By giving free rein to market forces, globalisation has created greater inequality and rising crime.
crime at both ends of the spectrum
Globalisation has created crime at both ends of the social spectrum. It has allowed transnational corporations to switch manufacturing to low-wage countries, producing job insecurity, unemployment and poverty. Deregulation means that governments have little control over their own economies, for example to create jobs or raise taxes, while state spending on welfare has declined. Marketisation has encouraged people to see themselves as individual consumers, calculating the personal costs and benefits of each action, undermining social cohesion. As left realists note, the increasingly materialistic culture promoted by the global media portrays success in terms of a lifestyle of consumption.
All these factors create insecurity and widening inequalities that encourage people, especially the poor, to turn to crime.
globalisation and jobs
The lack of legitimate job opportunities destroys self-respect and drives the unemployed to look for illegitimate ones, for instance in the lucrative drugs trade. For example, in Los Angeles, de-industrialisation has led to the growth of drugs gangs numbering 10,000 members.
At the same time, globalisation also creates criminal opportunities on a grand scale for elite groups. For example, the deregulation of financial markets has created opportunities for insider trading and the movement of funds around the globe to avoid taxation. Similarly, the creation of transnational bodies such as the European Union has offered opportunities for fraudulent claims for subsidies, estimated at over $7 billion per annum in the EU.
globalisation and patterns of employment
Globalisation has also led to new patterns of employment, which have created new opportunities for crime. It has led to the increased use of subcontracting to recruit ‘flexible’ workers, often working illegally or employed for less than the minimum wage or working in breach of health and safety or other labour laws.
Taylor’s theory is useful in linking global trends in the capitalist economy to changes in the pattern of crime.
However, it does not adequately explain how the changes make people behave in criminal ways. For example, not all poor people turn to crime.
Crime occurs at both ends of the class spectrum
Globalisation and working-class crime
* Exporting manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries
• Produces unemployment, job insecurity, poverty, and poor working conditions
• Marketisation promotys consumer individualism undermining
social cohesion
* This drives working classes to crime
Globalisation and upper-class crime
• Has led to increased opportunities for tax evasion
• EU has offered opportunities for fraudulent subsidies claims (57 billion per annum)
• Led to the demand for flexible work
• Illegal employment and conditions
• EU taking forced workers from North Korea
Why has International Crime
Increased? - marxists
Marxists claim the rise in international criminal networks links to inequalities between countries
• Poorer/developing countries supplying the demands of the rich west
*E.g. Apple
• Capitalism is to blame as incauses this greed - criminogenic
capitalism
* Greed is global, so crime is global
* There is no real desire to really tackle the activities of the global criminal networks since many of them have links to big businesses and are beyond the control of governments
Factors under why has international crime increased
McMafia
Patterns of Global crime
Global Crime and Global insecurity
Global organisations
Global multinationals
McMafia
• Globalisation has increased international crime gangs
• Globalisation has helped to create the conditions in which international crime gangs thrive
• Glenny (2008)
• Globalisation has brought with it the rise of the global organised crime networks - McMafia
* Their criminal activity operates on a global scale and in 2009 earned approx. 15% of the global GDP.
* Activities include: people trafficking, drug trafficking, sales of counterfeit goods including medicines and operating sex tourism
Patterns of global crime
According to Marxists, globalised crime has an economy of supp and demand:
• The rich west are the consumers
• Demanding products such as drugs, sex workers etc.
• The poor developing world countries produce the raw materials.
* E.g. drugs, prostitutes etc.
- Other developing countries act as the processing stage
* E.g. 20% of Columbian population are dependent on the cocaine trade for their livelihood
sociologist for global crime and global insecurity
glenny
Global Crime and Global insecurity
Glenny
• These patterns of global organized crime relate to patterns of inequality
• The rich west provide the demand which ensures the poorer developing countries become the suppliers and processors of the illegal goods
• The global criminal gangs are often too large and sophisticated to be effectively policed.
• No real desire by the ruling elite to limit their activities
sociologist for global organisations
Hobbes and Dunnigham
Global organisations
Hobbes & Dunningham
* Most global crime is locally based in its roots but with global connections.
• Impacts both local and global level
• Example:
* Drug dealers within Russia import cocaine from Columbia to sustain the markets in USA and UK
* The producers, dealers and users operate at the local level buying and selling at local rates and
- This then impacts the local community
Global multinationals
Global Corporations are also criminal
* Marxists claim that globalisation has led to the expansion of
corporate crime
• Tax evasion - Starbucks, anazon etc.
• Green Crime - Union Carbide, Bhopal disaster
• Laundering - FinCEN files
• Overlap between legitimate global companies and illegitimate ones as the latter use the former to launder their illegal profits
- e.g. The McMafia launder their money through legitimate banks
Russian insiders moved at least 520bn of dirty money from Moscow
into the western financial system between 2010 and 2014
• Crime involved Moldovan judges, a Latvian bank and a series of hub-companies, incorporated at Companies House in London
- These were “managed” by firms sitting in remote tax havens
crimes of globalisation sociologist
Rothe and Friedrichs (2015)
Rothe et al (2008)
Maureen Cain (2010)
Crimes of globalisation
Crimes of globalisation
Rothe and Friedrichs (2015) examine the role of international financial organisations such as the (IMF) and the World Bank in what they call ‘crimes of globalisation’
These organisations are dominated by the major capitalist states. For example, the World Bank has 188 member countries, yet just five - the USA, Japan, Germany, Britain and France - hold over a third of the voting rights.
Rothe and Friedrichs argue that these bodies impose pro-capitalist, neoliberal economic ‘structural adjustment programmes’ on poor countries as a condition for the loans they provide. These programmes often require governments to cut spending on health and education, and to privatise publicly-owned services (such as water supply), industries and natural resources.
While this allows Western corporations to expand into thee countries, it creates the conditions for crime. For example, Rothe et al (2008) show how the programme imposed on Rwanda in the 1980s caused mass unemployment and created the economic basis for the 1994 genocide (see below). Maureen Cain (2010) suggests that in some ways, the IMF and World Bank act as a ‘global state and.
While they may not break any laws, their actions can cause widespread social harns both directly, through cutting welfare spending, and indirectly, as in the Rwandan case.
patterns of criminal organisation sociologist
Hobbs and Dunningham
patterns of criminal organisation
, globalisation and de-industrialisation have created new criminal opportunities and patterns at a local level. Another local study of a post-industrial town, shows similar results.
Hobbs and Dunningham found that the way crime is organised is linked to the economic changes brought by globalisation. Increasingly, it involves individuals with contacts acting as a ‘hub’ around which a loose-knit criminal network forms. Hobbs and Dunningham arque that this contrasts with the large-scale, hierarchical ‘Mafia’-style criminal organisations of the past, such as that headed by the Kay brothers in the East End of London.
Glocal organisation
These new forms of organisation sometimes have international links, especialy with the drugs trade, but crime sill rooted in its local context. For example, individuat til need local contacts and networks to find opportunttes and to sell their drugs. Hobbs and Dunningham therefore conclude that crime works as a ‘glocal’ system. That is, ris still locally based, but with global connections. This means that the form it takes will vary from place to place, according to local conditions, even if it is influenced by global factors such as the availability of drugs from abroad.
Hobbs and Dunningham argue that changes associated with globalisation have led to changes in patterns of crime
- for example, the shift from the old rigidly hierarchical gang structure to loose networks of flexible, opportunistic, entrepreneurial criminals. However, it is not clear that such patterns are new, nor that the older structures have disappeared. It may be that the two have always co-existed.
Equally, their conclusions may not be generalisable to other criminal activities elsewhere.
sociologist for Mcmafia
glenny
McMafia - textbook
Another example of the relationship between criminal Organisation and globalisation is what Misha Glenny 2008)
Calls “McMafia’. This refers to the organisations that emerged in Russia and Eastern Europe following the fall of communism
- itself a major factor in the process of globalisation.
Glenny traces the origins of transnational organised crime to the break-up of the Soviet Union after 1989, which coincided with the deregulation of global markets.
Under communism, the Soviet state had regulated the prices of everything. However, following the fall of communism, the Russian government deregulated most sectors of the economy except for natural resources such as oil. These commodities remained at their old Soviet prices - often only a fortieth of the world market price. Thus anyone with access to funds - such as former communist officials and KGB (secret service) generals - could buy up oil, gas, diamonds or metals for next to nothing. Selling them abroad at an astronomical profit, these individuals became Russia’s new capitalist class - often popularly referred to as ‘oligarchs’.
Collapse of communism and McMafia
To protect their wealth capitalists therefore turned to the ‘mafias” that had begun to spring up.
These were often alliances between former KGB men and ex-convicts. However, these mafias were unlike the old Italian and American mafias, which were based on ethnic and family ties, with a clear-cut hierarchy. The new Russian mafias were purely economic organisations formed to pursue self-interest. Criminal organisations were vital to the entry of the new Russian capitalist class in the world economy. At the same time, the Russian mafias were able to build links with criminal organisations in other parts of the world.
Green crime meaning
Green or environmental crime can be defined as crime against the environment. Much green crime can be linked to globalisation and the increasing interconnectedness of societies. Regardless of the division of the world into separate nation-states, the planet is a single eco-system, and threats to the eco-system are increasingly global rather than merely local in nature. For example, atmospheric pollution from industry in one country can turn into acid rain that falls in another, poisoning its watercourses and destroying its forests. Similarly, an accident in the nuclear industry - such as the one at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986
- can spread radioactive material over thousands of miles, showing how a problem caused in one locality can have worldwide effects.
Global risk society and the environment
most of the threats to human well being and the eco-system are now human-made rather than natural. Unlike the natural dangers of the past, such as drought and famine, the major risks we face today are of our own making.
Ulrich Beck (1992) argues that in today’s late modern society we can now provide adequate resources for all (at least in the developed countries). However, the massive increase in productivity and the technology that sustains it have created new, ‘manufactured risks” - dangers that we have never faced before. Many of these risks involve harm to the environment and its consequences for humanity, such as global heating caused by greenhouse gas emissions from industry. Like climate change, many of these risks are global rather than local in nature, leading Beck to describe late modern society as ‘global risk society’.
Example of how the global nature of human made risk can produce crime
Mozambique
Mozambique
A striking example of how the global nature of human-made risk can produce crime and disorder comes from Mozambique in 2010. in Rusig where global heating triggered the hottest heatwave in a century, causing wildfires that destroyed parts of the county grain belt. The resulting shortage led Russia to introduce export bans and pushed up the world price of grain.
The knock-on effect in Mozambique, which is heavily dependent on food imports, was a 30% rise in the price of bread. This sparked extensive rioting and looting of food stores that left at least a dozen dead. Mozambique’s own harvest had been hit by drought, possibly also the result of global heating. At the same time, international speculators were engaging in what the World Development Movement called ‘gambling on hunger in financial markets (Patel, 2010).
Bhopal disaster
On the night of 2 December 1984, the US majority-owned pesticide plant at Bhopal, india, started leaking cyanide gas. The plant was no longer in active production and had fallen into disrepair. All six safety-systems failed to operate and 30 tons of gas spread through the city. Half a million people were exposed and some estimate that over 20,000 died.
(Union Carbide acknowledges only 3,800 deaths and claims the explosion was caused by sabotage.) 120,000 continue to suffer effects such as cancers, blindness, breathing difficulties, gynecological disorders and birth defects. As one survivor has said, ‘the lucky ones are the ones who died on that night’.
Heavy metals have been found in the breast milk of women living nearby. Fifteen years after the accident, local groundwater was found to contain up to 6 million times more mercury than normal. Campaigners say the site has never been cleaned up. No one has ever faced a criminal court.
The approach of traditional criminology to Bhopal focuses on the breaches of safety legislation and failure to follow oper maintenance procedures. The approach of green criminology takes a wider view, noting the advantages for the company in locating their plant in a country with weak health and safety and environmental protection legislation.
Perspectives of green come
Traditional Criminology
Green criminology
sciologist for traditional criminology
Situ and Emmons (2000)
Traditional criminology
Traditional criminology is defined by the criminal law. The starting point for this approach is the national and international taxs and regulations concerning the environment. For example, Situ and Emmons (2000) define environmental crime as ‘an unauthorized act or omission that violates the law’. Like other traditional approaches in criminology, it investigates the patterns and causes of lawbreaking.
The advantage of this approach is that it has a clearly defined subject matter.
eval of traditional crim
However, it is criticised for accepting official definitions of environmental problems and crimes, which are often shaped by powerful groups such as big business to serve their own interests.
sociologiist for green criminology
Rob White (2008)
Green criminology
Green criminology takes a more radical approach. It starts from the notion of harm rather than criminal law.
For example, Rob White (2008) argues that the proper subject of criminology is any action that harms the physical environment and/or the human and non-human animals within it, even if no law has been broken.
In fact, many of the worst environmental harms are not illegal, and so the subject matter of green criminology is much wider than that of traditional criminology. FOr this reason, green criminology is a form of transgressive criminology - it oversteps (transgresses) the boundaries of traditional criminology to include new issues. This approach is also known as ‘zemiology’ - literally, the study of harms.
Green criminology and laws
Furthermore, different countries have different laws, so that the same harmful action may be a crime in one country but not in another. Thus, legal definitions cannot provide a consistent standard of harm, since they are the product of individual nation-states and their political processes. By moving away from a legal definition, therefore, green criminology can develop a global perspective on environmental harm.
Green criminology can develop a global perspective on this approach is like the Marxist view of ‘crimes of the powerful. Marxists arque that the capitalist class are able to Shape the law and define crime so that their own explotative scrivities are not criminalised or, where they are, to ensure that enforcement is weak. Similarly, green criminologists argue that powerful interests, especialy nation-states and transnational corporations, are able to define in their own interests what counts as unacceptable environmental harm.
Two views of harm - green criminology
In general, nation-states and transnational corporations adopt what White (2008) calls an anthropocentric or human-centred view of environmental harm. This view assumes that humans have a right to dominate nature for their own ends, and puts economic growth before the environment.
White contrasts this with an eccentric view that sees humans and their environment as interdependent, so that environmental harm hurts humans also. This view sees both humans and the environment as liable to exploitation, particularly by global capitalism. In general, green criminology adopts the eccentric view as the basis for judging environmental harm.
Types of green crime sociologists
Nigel South 2020
Types of green crime
Primary Green Crime
Secondary Green Crime
Primary green crime
Primary green crimes are ‘crimes that result directly from the destruction and degradation of the earth’s resources’. South identifies four main types of primary crime
Types of primary green crime
Crimes of air pollution
Crimes of deforestation
Crimes of specie decline and animal abuse
Crimes of water pollution
