Crimes of the powerful

Question 1

White collar and corporate crime

Answer 1

• Defined as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status
• Sutherland, 2 different types of crime:
  1. Occupational: committed by employees against the organisation for which they work
  2. Corporate: committed by employees for their organisation in pursuit of its goals

Question 2

The scale and types of corporate crime

Answer 2

• One estimate puts the cost of white collar crimes in the USA at over 10x that of ordinary crimes
• Tombs (2013): corporate crime has enormous costs, physical, environmental, economic
• Corporate crime covers a wide range of acts and omissions, including:
  1. Financial crimes- tax evasion, money laundering
  2. Crimes against consumers- false labelling
  3. Crimes against employees- sexual and racial discrimination
  4. Crimes against the environment
  5. State-corporate crime

Question 3

The abuse of trust

Answer 3

• Carrabine et al (2014): we entrust high-status professionals with our finances, our health, security, personal info…
• KPMG: committed tax fraud and were given a fine of $456m
• Accountants and lawyers can be employed by criminal organisations which may result in the inflation of fees, committing forgery…
• Harold Shipman case: believed to have murdered over 200 of his patients

Question 4

The invisibility of corporate crime

Answer 4

Reasons why:

1. The media:
   - Very little coverage of corporate crime, which reinforces the stereotype that crime is a w/c phenomenon
   - They describe corporate crime in sanitised language: embezzlement = ‘accounting irregularities’
2. Lack of political will:
   - Politicians’ rhetoric of being ‘tough on crime’ is focused on street crime
   - Home Office uses crime surveys to discover the true extent of ‘ordinary crime’, not corporate crime
3. Complex corporate crime:
   - Law enforcement is understaffed, under-resourced and lacking technical expertise
4. De-labelling:
   - Corporate crime is consistently filtered out from the process of criminalisation
   - Penalties are often fines rather than jail..
5. Under-reporting
   - No specific victim
   - Not regarded as a ‘real’ crime

Question 5

Partial visibility

Answer 5

• Since the financial crisis of 20118, corporate crime has become more visible
• Campaigns such as Occupy and UK Uncut are against corporate tax avoidance and investigate journalists and the media…]
• Neoliberal policies: marketisation and privatisation of public services mean that large corporations are much more involved in people’s lives

Question 6

Explanations of corporate crime

Answer 6

1. Strain theory:
   - Box (1983): if a company can’t achieve its goal of maximising profit by legal means, it may employ illegal ones instead
2. Differential association:
   - Sutherland (1949): crime is behaviour that we have learned from others in a social context
   - If a company’s culture justifies committing crimes to achieve corporate goals, employees will be socialised into this criminality
   - Link to 2 other concepts:
   a) deviant subcultures
   b) techniques of neutralisation
3. Labelling theory:
   - Nelken (2012): corporations have the ability to avoid labelling
   - They can buy lawyers and accountants
4. Marxism:
   - Because the goal of capitalism is to maximise profits, it inevitably causes harm
   - Box (1983): mystification: the ideology is spread that corporate crime is less widespread or harmful than w/c crime

Question 7

Evaluation

Answer 7

• The strain theory and Marxism overpredict the amount of business crime
• Doesn’t explain the crime in non-profit making state agencies such as the police
• Braithwaite (1984): law abiding is more profitable than law breaking, case study of US pharmaceutical companies