corporate crime

corporate crime So far, in these lectures, we've been looking at crimes like robbery and murder, both from historical view of point and also in contemporary society. And we've seen the preoccupation of western societies with crime and with lawlessness is a pile of long and continuous tradition rather than something which is null and unique to modern society. But over the past 70 years or so, there's been a massive increase in one type of crime which was what's known as corporate crime. Corporate crime is crime which as the name suggests, is connected with companies, with business organizations. It includes illegal acts leader, individuals or a group within a company. But what is important is that these actors normally in accordance with the goals of the company. They're for the good of the company rather than the individual. It's been defined as, quote, crime which is committed for the corporate organization, the company, not against it, unquote. So crimes like theft by employees, things like... err... embezzlement or fraud against one's actual employer are excluded, according to this definition. The employees maybe involve but they're acting in the first place for the company. They may not even realize that they commit a crime, or they may realize but they feel it's excusable because it's policy, or because otherwise they may lose their jobs. So here we're really talking about the links between power and crime. Now this is one area that much less generally known about the conventional or traditional crime. It's been relatively ignored by the mass media. For example, it tends to be underreported in comparison with conventional crime in news broadcasts and in crime series of films and so on. They very rarely deal with corporate crime. And it also tends to be ignored in academic circles, as being far more research on conventional crime and far more data is available. There're several reasons for this lack of interest in corporate crime compared with other types of crime. It's often very complex, whereas conventional crime, it's usually possible to follow what's going on without specialist knowledge. As well as this, whereas conventional crime has a lot of human interest, corporate crime often has much less. The third reason, and possibly the most significant one, is that very often that victims are unaware. They think their misfortune is an accident, or that is the fault of no one in particular. They're unaware that they've been victims of a crime. So when we look at the effects of corporate crime, we may find it's very difficult to assess the costs, but these costs can be very considerable in both their economic and social aspects. Let's look at the economic costs first. For example, if a company is producing fruit juice, and it dilutes its product, so that's just a little below the concentration it should be, many millions of people may be paying a small amount of extra for their carrot orange juice. Now some amounts like this may seem insignificant for individual customers, too small to worry about. But for the company, this deception might result in massive illegal profit. However all our studies of corporate crime agree that the individuals are in fact deprived of far more money by such crime than they're by conventional crime like robbery and theft. In addition to this we have to consider the social costs of corporate crime. And these are again very difficult to assess but they're considerable. They're important because they can undermine the faith of the public in the business world. And also, more importantly, because the main group of people they're in fact effected not the richer section of the society but the poorer. So here, companies are robbing the poorer then benefit the rich. There're two more points to do with corporate crime. Then I'd like to illustrate with the reference to a pacific event which occurred several years ago. This was an explosion of a large oil tanker which cost the loss of more than fifty lives of the crew. It was an explosion which never should have happened and the subsequent inquiry laid the blame not on anyone who's actually been on the tanker at the time but on the owners of the tanker. They had deliberately decided not to carry out necessary repair work on the tanker as it was due to be sold. And it was this lack of repair work which was directly responsible for the explosion. Now this illustrates two points to do with corporate crime. First of all, that it's not had to be intentional. The owners of the tanker certainly did not intend it to explode but very serious consequence can result from people or organizations not considering the possible results are their actions seriously enough. The main crime here was indifference to the human results rather than actual intention to harm anyone. But that didn't make the results any less tragic. And this leads to my second point. That corporate crime can have very severe consequences. It's not just a matter of companies making big profits they should do, but of offense which may affect the lives of innocent people. And here're very often companies, because they say they didn't intend to harm anyone, can avoid taking responsibility for the results of their actions, and that has been a very dangerous slop hole in the law. Now further example of corporate crime was the...