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Topic 3
Globalisation, Evaluations of Crime and Globalisation
Difficult…
Topic 3
Globalisation
Globalisation and Crime
The growing interconnectedness of the world
Held & McGrew - "The widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness"
Nature and Extent of Global Crime
- Karofi and Mwanza = globalisation has led to a Global Criminal Economy (New opportunities for crime and new types of crime are constantly emerging)
Human Trafficking
- Illegal movement of people (smuggling, slavery, prostitution, children)
- National Crime Agency (UK) - Around 13,000 people in slavery in the UK, who had been victims of HT
Money Laundering
- Making illegal money look like it came from legal means
- Difficult to track for agencies and hard to measure how much it happens
International Illegal Drug Trade
- $322 billion each year (World Drug Report 2017)
- Involves numerous countries: growing, smuggling, selling
Cybercrime
- One of the fastest growing criminal activities in the world
- Completely 'global' and now able to target different countries. Credit card fraud / cybercrime attacks
- Financial cybercrime costs the UK government 27 billion per year
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Green Crime
Green Crime, Globalisation, and Global Risk Society
- Beck - Many environmental crimes are caused by humans, no longer natural (flooding) - Science and Technology (Manufactured Risk)
- Increase in tech = 'Manufactured risk due to sustainability issues - These risks impact the environment (Greenhouse gases, global warming)
- Beck = Further issues like global warming pose a risk to the whole world -> Global risk society (global risk transcend national boundaries)
- White illustrates globalised character of environmental harms due to transnational companies moving around and operating in ways to save money (dumping waste, moving to countries that have no pollution laws)
A Transgressive Approach to Green Crime
- Some illegal activity may be legal in some countries, to overcome this - Lynch and Stretsky suggest that we should adopt a wider approach which goes beyond defining environmental crime
- White = Green crime should be any crime which harms the environment, whether legal or illegal - sometimes referred to as environmental justice approach (EJA)
E.g
- Pollution
- Contamination of land
- Burning fossil fuels
Case Examples
1) Disaster in Bhopal India
- Traditional criminological / EJA
Union carbide leaked poisonoustext gas - 25,000 dead, 120,000 serious symptoms (birth defects / blindness)
2) BP Deepwater Horizon
- Gulf of Mexico - largest accidental marine oil spill
11 deaths, extreme damage to wildlife, fishing and tourism
3) Volkswagen Emissions
- 11 Million vehicles = defeat device cheating the emissions tests - contributing 1mil tonne to air pollution
"Actions which break laws protecting the environment" - Wolf
E.g
- Pollution
- Climate Change
- Waste Disposal
- Nuclear Power
- Issues with the definition = Doesn't cover 'legal' harm (legal logging, deforestation, huge corporation polluting, waste disposal, etc)
Who Commits Green Crime
- Wolf - 4 groups who commit green crime
1) Individuals - Can have a powerful cumulative impact through littering and fly tipping
2) Private Business Organisation - These cause the most devastating harm (corporate crime of dumping waste)
3) States and Governments - Santana - Collusion with private companies. The military is the largest institutional polluter and warfare plays a major role in environmental destruction
4) Organised Crime - Interpol - a significant proportion of green crime is carried out by global criminal networks who are attracted by the low risk and high profit nature of these types of crime, in collusion with government (Mafia)
Victims of Green Crime
- Wolf - There are wide inequalities in the distribution of harm and risks to victims
- People in developing countries are or likely victims of environmental harm stemming from developed countries - worst impact is on ethnic minority groups
- Working class areas are also more likely to be affected
Enforcement against Green Crime
- Governments are mainly responsible for creating and enforcing laws and regulations that control green crime in collaboration with companies who are most likely to be offenders
- Snider (Marxist) - argues states are reluctant to pass laws against pollution or other environmental harm and only do so when pressured by public opinion
- Sutherland pointed out that environmental crimes do not carry the same stigma as conventional crimes, like street crime and companies have power and legal resources to avoid having them labelled as criminal
- Laws may only be enforced through fines rather than criminal prosecution
Explaining Green Crime
- White - Argues green crime exists because transnational corporations tend to hold an anthropocentric view (Human centred - considers harm from human perspective - if environmental damage hurts humans = 'harm')
- Most important consideration if for citizens through economic growth and the environment is a secondary condition
- Wolf - Green crime is committed for the same reasons normal crime is: strain theory, rational choice, etc.
- Marxists - Pearce see the most serious green crimes as 'the crimes of the powerful' as corporate crimes and committed by companies motivated to break law to reduce costs and maximise profit
Problems with Researching Green Crime
1) Different Laws - Countries have different laws about green crime - official statistics may not always be comparable between different countries
2) Different Definitions - Disputes over what counts as green crime, varying between nations -Wolf = Points out this generates problems in the measurement, monitoring and reporting of green crimes, and there are few reliable standardised sources of data
3) Difficulties in measurement - Green crime is often carried out by individuals, organised crime syndicates, powerful companies with the ability to conceal their crimes - makes crimes difficult to discover and measure
4) The use of Case Studies
- Much research has taken the form of case studies on individual cases of green crime Wold = limited use in explaining and making generalisations about the cause of green crime
State Crime
Transgressive Approach
- One way of exploring state crime (looking at human rights - what everyone is entitled to / fair and just treatment)
- Natural Right - What people are regarded as having simply by virtue of existing (life and speech)
- Civil Right - Rights of individuals (vote / privacy)
- Green & Ward adopt - "State organisational deviance involved the violation of human rights"
- Legal human right breaches are covered
Problems with defining State Crimes
- Social construction of crime and deviance
- Each state decides what law is so can avoid defining certain acts as criminal (persecution of Jewish people under Nazi Germany)
- Crimes of the powerful
Green & Ward - "Illegal or deviant activities perpetrated b, or with the complicity of state agencies to further state policies"
E.g
- Genocide
- War Crime
- Torture
Explaining State Crime - Integrated Theory
- State crime arises from similar circumstances to those normal crimes
- If all 3 elements integrate then the state will break human rights and commit state crime
- Motivation of Offender
- Opportunity
- Failure of control
Explaining State Crime - Crime of Obedience Model
- Some argue that torture etc. are part of a role that people are socialised into, looking at the condition that make such behaviour acceptable
- Some like Kelman & Hamilton have focused on 'Crimes of obedience' - It's snot disobedience but obedience which causes crime
- Some see this in relation to Nazi's following orders during the final solution, or in cases like My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war where 400 civilians were killed by US soldiers
Features that produce crimes of obedience
1) Authorisation
- When acts are order or approved by higher authority - Moral principles are replaced by a duty to obey
2) Dehumanisation
- 'Enemy of state' - subhuman - Not to be treated as normal
- Here the usual principle of morality doesn't apply
3) Routinisation
- Crime becomes routine - common practice done in a clinical, detached manner
Examples of State Crime
1) Corruption
- This involves organised plunder of national resource by a ruling elite ( Former Egyptian dictator overthrown in 2011 - worth £70 billion embezzled from Egyptian state coffers)
2) The torture and Illegal treatment or punishment of citizens
- Systematic torture, disappearance and mass murders of 1000's of political opponents of the Gaddafi regime in Libya
3) Genocide
- Mass murder of a group of people belonging to a certain ethnic group (Nazi regime, killing 6 million Jews)
4) War Crime
- Illegal acts committed during war (looting / torture ) Israel repeatedly been condemned for targeting civil population of Israel- Palestine Conflict
Techniques of Neutralisation
- Cohen - States neutralise crime by labelling them as something else, or excusing them as regrettable but justifiable
- Illegal torture - justified by prosecution of citizens
- By doing this state provides excuses and justifications for their human right breaches
Problems of Researching State Crimes
1) - Cohen - Governments adopt strategies of denial to either delay or justify actions (reclassify calling them something else)
2) State crimes are carried out by powerful people, who have a huge armoury to state agencies at their disposal to control information, and to cover up any of the state's criminal activity
- State secrecy = no official statistics or victim surveys can show the extent of this crime
- Dark figure of hidden state crimes is probably much greater than that of unrecorded and unreported crime
3) - Tombs and Whyte point out that researchers are likely to face strong official resistance, and states can use their power to prevent or hinder sociologists doing research - by threats, by refusals to provide funding
4) - Greene and Ward - Point out research can be difficult, harrowing (because of the nature of the offences) and dangerous, and the state can use the law and CJS to control and persecute researchers whom it perceives to be its enemies
Media
Crime as a Consumer Spectacle
- Hayward and Young - Media has turned crime and deviance into tools for selling products in the consumer market (GTA)
- Romanticises C & D, exciting, cool, dramatic
- Sells it as being fashionable and desirable (crime documentaries)
- The media combines crime with positive images such as earning money, being 'popular' etc. which represents crime as being a lifestyle which has rewards
- True crime documentaries have now become an integral part of our society, with Netflix producing new crime doc = 'hooked' - Crime now drives profit
Agenda - Setting
- Power to manage which issues are to presented and which issues are kept in the background
- The media can provide impressions of crime and deviance through selective publication
- This means our perception of C & D is heavily influenced by the media - regardless of whether they're accurate
- Media cannot report every single crime so are very selective on which they report - creates an impression within society (or their readers)
- People only discuss C & D they've been informed about the media rather than personal experience - influences people perception (secondary socialisation)
News Values
- Values and assumptions held by editors which guide them in choosing what is 'news worthy'
Greer and Reiner - Sexual and violent crimes interest the viewer, therefore certain crimes are dramatized and over-represented to captivate the public
-Reiner - media coverage is filtered through the values and assumptions of crime thrillers, writers and journalists about what makes a story worth telling - 'Newsworthy'
- Jewkes - Suggests the NV that influence the reporting of crime and deviance:
1) Individualism
- Actions / conflict between individuals, voiding complex explanations
2) Children
- As offenders or victims have the potential of being newsworthy
3) Sex
- Sexual dimensions, women as victims, non-criminal sexual deviance (BDSM)
4) Violence
- Enable media to report using the drama to appeal to audiences
Backwards Law
- CSEW suggests that the majority of people base their opinions and knowledge of crime on the media rather than using official sources or their own experience
- Surette - 'Backwards law' with the media constructing the images of c & d which are an opposite or backwards version of reality
- Greer and Reiner - Concept of backwards law is shown by the media in several ways
- Overrepresenting and exaggerating sex, drug and serious violence (murder) and underrepresentation of common offences (property)
- Portraying property crime as far more serious and violent than recorded offences
- Exaggerating risks of becoming victims faced by higher status white people and older people
- Exaggerating police effectiveness in solving crimes
- Left realists suggests media reporting disguises the reality that both offenders and victims are mainly from the working class and poor
- Marxists - WCC + CC are concealed
Moral Entrepreneurs
- Those in power who have the ability to create and enforce rules
- The media and the 'self appointed guardians of national morality' by labelling and stereotyping certain groups or individuals as deviant as they act outside of societies moral boundaries
Deviancy Amplifications, Folk Devils and Moral Panics
DA - The media showing crime 'amplifies' the amount of crime in society
FD - A group of people in society who are portrayed as being violent / deviant / criminal
MP - A mass expression of fear and concern over someone or someone, threatening values and norms of society
- Hall - crime of mugging (black mugger - 1970's)
- Cohen (FD & MP)
- Both show how media can exaggerate crime where reports generate public anxiety
- Presence of reports can influence behaviour to be worse (DA)
How Relevant is the concept of moral panic today
- McRobbie & Thornton - Outdated and no longer useful for understanding crime, due to the growing sophistication of the media and technology (media saturated) - web pages (Facebook, YouTube have changed the reporting and reaction to events that once would have caused a moral panic)
- Pluralists and postmodernists argue there is now such a huge diversity of media reports and interpretations that people are more sceptical of mainstream media reports being less likely to trust them / cause a moral panic
- Hunt boundaries between immoral and moral behaviour has become blurred
- Beck - 'risk society' = now so many risks and uncertainties that many of the things that used to generate moral panics are now a normality in everyday life / Moral panics are now too vague meaning it is harder to define
- Steve Hall - Dismisses concept of moral panics - suggests newspaper headlines "grind selfishness and anti-social behaviour" but haven't produced moral panics and they are unfounded - Media sensationalize specific crime which causes concern among the public but it also overstates the CJS ability to solve crime which then soothes the anxiety = opposite of panic
- Hall - there is also rational concerns for real crimes - disadvantaged communities that can't provide informal controls
- Hall - moral panics are an ideological construction by liberal sociologists who dismiss peoples anxieties
- Liberal sociologist don't concern themselves with rational fears, Hall see's moral panics as a zombie concept - importance attached to moral panic is comparable with living with the undead
Do the media cause crime?
- Greer & Reiner - very long history of ' respectable fears' about the media causing crime:
1) Labelling, Moral Entrepreneurship and Deviancy Amplification
- Media reporting
2) Knowledge and Learning of Criminal Techniques
- Influence of videos and games (Childs Play 3 influencing Jamie Bulgers killers / GTA)
3) New Means of Committing Crime
- Technology (media and internet) = now opportunities for cybercrime, transnational crime and terrorism
4) Providing a target for crime
- Media hardware and software provides new targets for property crime such as smartphones, laptops, TV's and DVD's
Evaluations of Crime and Globalisation
- Difficult to measure due to secretive nature – makes it difficult to assess reliability and validity on the little data we do have
- Research can be dangerous as it involves powerful organisations
- Significance of globalisation may have been exaggerated – crime rates for most offences are dropping in the UK
- Could impact some countries more than others due to money or law enforcement
- Has meant growing interconnectedness of law enforcement to stop certain offences (trafficking)
Evaluations to Green Crime Explanations
- Green criminology is useful in addressing the growing threats of environmental harm , and locates this within context of globalisation
- GC is now a result of corporate crime - White - has referred to as 'Eco-global criminology' & points out that their is lack of clarity and agreement about what environment al crime actually is and how much 'it depends open who is defining the harm ' = even greater risk of influence by the values-judgements and subjective interpretations of researcher