Professional Documents
Culture Documents
COSTS
Sales: 11 million cars, 1.5 million light trucks.
Unit Cost: $11 per car, $11 per truck.
15000
10000
5000 11436
5146 6290
3291
0
n ts ses i s. i de
e a D ic
c id i se & m
Ac c .d c c. H o
O c A
A ratio of 7:1 – seven times as many work-placed deaths
than homicides (once figures adjusted for risk)
Injuries resulting from Corporate
Crime
• Thalidomide
– Chemie Grunenthal deliberately falsified test
data, and concealed the dangers of the drug
• Lung Cancer and Passive Smoking
• Asbestos
Financial Costs of Corporate
Crime
Mirror Pensioners
• £440 million missing from Daily Mirror pension
funds : 30,000 employees / former employees of
Mirror Group affected
Levi (1987)
- Cost of fraud reported to fraud squads: £2113
million
- Twice the cost of theft, burglary and robbery that
year
Other Harms
• Health Care
– negligence, injuries and deaths, drug reactions and
interactions
• Chemical Warfare
– pollution, toxic wastes, smoking, food additives,
pesticides
• Poverty
– Higher infant mortality, lower rates of health, shorter
life expectancy
• Consumer Safety
– Defective Products
Problems with “Hidden”
Corporate Crime
• Construction of Official Statistics
• Media Constructions of the Criminal:
‘Respectable’ v ‘Criminal’
• CJS focus on “conventional” crime
– Corporate crime largely outside control of Criminal
Justice
– Most cases emerge from campaigning / whistle-
blowing
– Crime is seen as individualistic, inter-personal, and
finite: much corporate crime does not fit the model
Organized Crime
• The production, supply and financing of
illegal markets in good and services
• Organizations established with criminal
intent, though the divide from corporate
crime is not always clear
• Much organized crime is “governmental”:
threatening the State’s monopoly of
coercion, protection and extraction
Range of Organized Criminality
• Organized theft and sale of stolen goods
• Protection rackets
• Markets covering prohibited goods and
services
– Drugs, illegal drinking, illegal arms,
prostitution, people trafficking, gambling,
pornography
• Money Lending
• Money laundering
Themes in the study of organized crime
• Globalization
– Localised ‘firms’ replaced by globalized
enterprises
• Relationship to legitimate businesses
– Legitimate business as a “front”
– Provision of services to businesses
– Legitimate businesses providing services to
organized crime (consciously or unconsciously)
• Opportunities provided by criminalization
Problems for Criminology
• Conceptual
– Most of the ‘crimes of the powerful’ challenge
mainstream assumptions of what crime is (e.g.
victim/offender)
• Empirical
– Evidence of these crimes are much harder to obtain
• Explanatory
– Mainstream theories need adapting, though many can
retain relevance
– Direct and Indirect Causes
• Theoretical
– Is ‘crime’ the model? Harm?