Gourt > Society > Issues > Business > Corporate Crime
In criminology, corporate crime refers to crimes either committed by a corporation, i.e. a business entity having a separate legal personality from the natural persons that manage its activities, or by individuals that may be identified with a corporation or other business entity (see vicarious liability and corporate liability). This type of crime therefore overlaps with:
- white-collar crime because the majority of individuals who may act as or represent the interests of the corporation will be employees or professionals of a higher social class;
- organized crime because criminals can set up corporations either for the purposes of crime or as vehicles for laundering the proceeds of crime. Organized crime has become a branch of big business and is simply the illegal sector of capital. It has been estimated that, by the middle of the 1990s, the "gross criminal product" of organised crime made it the twentieth richest organisation in the world and richer than 150 sovereign states (Castells 1998: 169). The world’s gross criminal product has been estimated at 20 percent of world trade. (de Brie 2000); and
- state-corporate crime because, in many contexts, the opportunity to commit crime emerges from the relationship between the corporation and the state.
Definitional issues
Legal person
The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution stipulates that,- "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Function of law
History shows that laws have sometimes been used as instruments of repression, exclusion, and marginalisation; and that certain criminal justice policies may sometimes be intended to serve the interests of particular groups or to undermine other groups. Thus, the definition of crime and the nature of criminal justice policies in society usually reflect the structures of power in that society. Also, while mainstream criminologists tend to focus mostly on street crimes and crimes of marginalised groups, the less obvious crimes of states, corporate organisations, and powerful groups are often ignored or under-emphasised. Lea (2001) argues that whereas crime used to be the exceptional event, disrupting the otherwise normal socio-economic processes, as crime becomes more frequent it lost its status as an exceptional event and became "a standard, background feature of our lives—a taken for granted element of late modernity." (Garland 1996: 446) More on [ Corporate crime ]
Allegedly Unethical Firms :: Business
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