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