The Routledge International Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful

Gregg Barak, Gregg Barak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317807315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Criminologia

Across the world, most people are well aware of ordinary criminal harms to person and property. Often committed by the powerless and poor, these individualized crimes are catalogued in the statistics collected annually by the FBI and by similar agencies in other developed nations. In contrast, the more harmful and systemic forms of injury to person and property committed by powerful and wealthy individuals, groups, and national states are neither calculated by governmental agencies nor annually reported by the mass media. As a result, most citizens of the world are unaware of the routinized "crimes of the powerful", even though they are more likely to experience harms and injuries from these types of organized offenses than they are from the atomized offenses of the powerless.

Research on the crimes of the powerful brings together several areas of criminological focus, involving organizational and institutional networks of powerful people that commit crimes against workers, marketplaces, taxpayers and political systems, as well as acts of torture, terrorism, and genocide. This international handbook offers a comprehensive, authoritative and structural synthesis of these interrelated topics of criminological concern. It also explains why the crimes of the powerful are so difficult to control.

Edited by internationally acclaimed criminologist Gregg Barak, this book reflects the state of the art of scholarly research, covering all the key areas including corporate, global, environmental, and state crimes. The handbook is a perfect resource for students and researchers engaged with explaining and controlling the crimes of the powerful, domestically and internationally.

Part I
Culture, ideology and the crimes of the powerful

1
Crimes of the powerful and the definition of crime

David O. Friedrichs

Introduction

In 1897 an English-language book by Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Anthropology, was published. Lombroso’s approach to understanding crime was tremendously influential in the development of criminology in relation to its focus upon conventional, individual offenders and the application of a positivistic approach to the study of crime and criminality. Lombroso, an Italian physician, is quite uniformly identified as a pioneer criminologist, and typically, significant space is devoted to his career and his ideas in any history of criminology. For Lombroso – and for most criminologists who have followed in his wake – crime is principally an activity engaged in by the powerless, but in the year following the publication of Criminal Anthropology, in 1898, a French judge, Louis Proal, published a book entitled Political Crime. The book was published by D. Appleton and Company as part of a “Criminology Series” edited by W. Douglas Morrison, including his own book, Our Juvenile Offenders, The Female Offender by Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero, and Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri. Proal addressed the crimes that are carried out in the political domain, with the most consequential of these perpetrated or directed by powerful political leaders. Among other topics, the book addressed tyranny, war and corruption. Proal and his book are almost wholly unknown to contemporary criminologists, and Proal’s work is not addressed in standard histories of the development of the field of criminology and criminological theories. Yet let us suppose it had been the other way around: that it was Proal and not Lombroso who became an iconic figure in the history of criminology. If it had played out this way the whole character and focus of criminology might be quite different, with the majority of criminologists focused upon the crimes of the powerful. The crimes of the powerless would in this scenario be a somewhat more limited focus of criminological research and exposition.

There is significant resistance among many criminologists to engaging with the definitional issues relating to crime or to specific types of crime. This author has encountered over the years any number of comments on “tedious” and “interminable” definitional discussions. Many criminologists clearly prefer to “get on with the work” of addressing specific theoretical and empirical questions that arise in relation to crime and its control, as opposed to devoting time and intellectual energy to dialogues relating to definitional and conceptual issues. Such impatience is understandable on a certain level, and the downside of becoming “imprisoned” by definitional conundrums to the point where one is hindered from addressing concrete and consequential “real-world” issues needs to be acknowledged. But the premise here is that avoidance of core definitional issues has costly consequences in relation to theoretical and empirical progress. All too often, we end up with criminologists talking past each other or generating a bottomless well of confusion and misunderstanding because the core concept of “crime” is not clearly defined. Addressing the definitional issues has to be a fundamental starting point for any coherent discussion of crimes of the powerful. The historical focus principally on the crimes of the powerless, not the powerful, is significantly a function of how crime has been defined and imagined.

There is a long and enduring history of invoking the term “crime” without any attempt to define it. For many people the meaning of the term “crime” is clearly taken to be obvious. The term crime is most widely equated with conventional criminal offenses, or violations of the criminal law that are exemplified in the United States by the FBI’s index crimes: murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, auto theft, larceny and arson. This is the type of crime traditionally of most concern to the American public, along with drug-related offenses and recent concerns about terrorism, and these offenses account for most of the “mass imprisonment” of the recent era (Abramsky, 2007). The largest proportion of criminological scholarship addressing crime through the present era encompasses one or more of these types of crime. But there is also a long tradition critical of the limitations of a conventional conception of crime (Hall, 2012; Henry and Lanier, 2001; Tifft and Sullivan, 1980). Accordingly, the claim is made that much of the focus of mainstream criminologists is seriously skewed.

If criminology as an enterprise has focused very disproportionally on the crimes of the powerless as opposed to the crimes of the powerful, why is this so? It is rooted in part in the historical circumstance of embracing a certain conception of crime, which over time becomes reinforced and reified. The media and the broader public discourse on crime, as well as the political classes, are disproportionally focused upon conventional forms of crime. Graduate students in criminology came to adopt the conception of crime of their professors and mentors, and a cohort effect continues to reinforce this conception of crime and criminals (Savelsberg and Flood, 2004). Career advancement is best realized by focusing on the types of crime that is the primary focus of the public as well as of those who shape the curriculum of criminal justice and criminology programs. The vast majority of students who enroll in such programs are focused upon conventional criminals and their control. Powerless offenders, often institutionalized, are more readily available as research subjects than powerful offenders. Furthermore, powerful entities are well positioned to derail or retaliate against research projects directed at their activities. Powerless entities have no such influence or clout. Altogether, a confluence of factors militate against a focus upon crimes of the powerful, and those who choose to do so must often contend with various forms of direct and indirect pressure to shift their attention elsewhere.

Defining crime and the criminological mainstream

As Robert Agnew (2011: 13) notes, little space and time are devoted to considering the definition of crime in mainstream texts and in discussions of crime and criminological phenomena. Much mainstream criminology clearly adopts a taken-for-granted approach to what the term crime (and criminal) refers to, with a strong if not exclusive emphasis upon conventional types of crime. A volume entitled The Future of Criminology, edited by Rolf Loeber and Brandon C. Welsh (2012), exemplifies this pattern. Nowhere in this volume do we find any discussion of the meaning of crime or criminal: it is taken for granted that readers understand what these terms refer to (i.e., conventional law-breaking and “street” criminals). There is no acknowledgment of any kind that crime and criminals may exist outside the conventional framing of such activity. Nor is there any acknowledgment that “the future of criminology” extends beyond the criminological mainstream, and accordingly there is at a minimum an implicit if not explicit dismissal of the notion that any criminological concerns outside the mainstream criminological framework are part of a legitimate criminological enterprise. The exclusion of a vast range of willfully harmful endeavors – by states, corporations, and other hugely powerful entities – is immensely limiting for a criminology that aspires to remain relevant in the twenty-first century. This type of institutionalized parochialism – which is quite pervasive within criminology – may be attributed at least partially to the dismissal of definitional and conceptual issues.

Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi’s (1990) “general theory of crime” is – within the American context – the single most widely cited and widely tested criminological theory of the present era (see, e.g., Cohn and Farrington, 2012; Goode, 2008; Madfis, 2012). This general theory holds that crime (all crime) is best explained as a function of low self-control and poor parenting. Indeed, Gottfredson and Hirschi claim that this explanation applies not just to those types of behavior that are commonly characterized as “crime,” but to the whole range of patterns of deviant conduct (e.g., all forms of substance abuse) as well as proneness to accidents and so forth. The popularity of this theory may well be the attractiveness of adopting a form of explanation with a limited number (as opposed to a multiplicity) of variables, and the availability of standard instruments for testing the theory which allow for the generation of findings in a quantifiable form, with the application of impressive multiple regression equations and so forth. Gottfredson (2011: 36) has recently argued against the adoption of either a legalistic definition of crime or a disciplinary definition of crime, in favor of a behavioral definition of crime as “part of a much larger set of behaviours that provide (or appear to provide) momentary benefit for the actor but which are costly in a longer term.” It should be obvious that such a definition of crime inherently aligns crime with the behavioral patterns of members of society who are powerless, not powerful, and skews the study of crime almost exclusively to street crime. On the one hand, Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990: 191; Gottfredson 2011: 39) have referred to white-collar crime – and organizational crime specifically – as “rare.” On the other hand, they have also claimed that the profiles for white-collar and conventional offenders are virtually parallel. Both claims have been challenged, as have the huge limitations of the general theory in relation to understanding white-collar crime (Friedrichs and Schwartz, 2008). Crimes of the powerful are anything but rare, and powerful criminals have dramatically different profiles from conventional offenders. Donald Palmer (2012), a professor of sociology and organizational behavior, argues that organizational wrong-doing is in fact “normal.”

The criminological critique of the mainstream conception of crime

At least some criminologists who would be classified as falling within the parameters of the criminological mainstream acknowledge the limitations of the traditional, mainstream crimino-logical way of defining and studying crime. Robert Agnew (2011), in Toward a Unified Criminology, specifically engages with the work of a range of critical criminologists and puts forth an integrated definition of crime that seeks to find some common ground between mainstream and critical criminological approaches to defining crime. The advantages of this integrated definition of crime, which promotes a broadening of the scope of criminological concerns, are fully addressed by him. John Hagan (2010), in his Who are the Criminals?, offers a potent critique of the conventional, mainstream framing of the problem of crime, with its highlighting of street crime or conventional crime and its relative inattention to suite crime or high-level white-collar crime. Hagan has produced several recent books on genocide and international criminal justice in relation to crimes of states. Both Agnew and Hagan have been recipients of major forms of recognition by the criminological establishment and are highly respected contemporary criminologists. Accordingly, their critiques of the mainstream way of defining of and conceiving of the problem of crime are at least potentially influential. Joachim Savelsberg (2010) is another prominent criminologist aligned with the mainstream who has argued for criminological attention to human rights violations. It remains to be seen whether a critical mass of mainstream criminologists will heed the call for an expanded scope of criminological concerns.

There is a long-standing tradition of critique of conventional conceptions of crime that have been advanced by self-described radical or critical criminologists (see, e.g., DeKeseredy and Dragiewicz, 2012; Tifft and Sullivan, 1980; Watts et al., 2008). Richard Quinney (1970) introduced in The Social Reality of Crime an influential conception of crime as a construct put forth by the powerful to reflect their interests. The “humanistic” definition of crime put forth by Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1970) is quite familiar and has been widely cited. The approach to conceiving of crime as “crimes of capital” by Raymond Michalowski (1985), in Order, Law and Crime, was another noteworthy contribution. Stuart Henry and Mark Lanier (2001), in an in-depth consideration of the definition of crime, have advanced a “prism of crime” definition (see also Agnew, 2011). For some criminologists, the term crime itself is inevitably so limiting and so constrained by its historical meaning that it should be abandoned in favor of “social harm” as the focus of our concern, with criminology itself being replaced by “zemiology,” or the study of harm (see Friedrichs and Schwartz, 2007; Hillyard et al., 2004). A call on the part of Victoria Greenfield and Letizia Paoli (2013) for creating “a framework to assess the harms of crimes” represents one recent initiative to increase the focus on the harm dimension inherent to definitions of crime.

Altogether, the radical and critical critiques of the definition of crime promote attention to the crimes of the powerful, and take a form which recognizes that the crimes of the powerful tend to be exponentially more consequential than the crimes of the powerless.

Who are the powerful?

If the definition of crime itself is contentious, the notion of “the powerful” also requires some attention. It is widely recognized that “power” is a key force (some suggest the key force) in the world inhabited by human beings, and many tomes have been devoted to addressing the concept of power (e.g. Hearn, 2012). We need not engage with this large literature here, but one should acknowledge that the powerful is a somewhat elastic term. It can be stretched to encompass the unambiguously powerful but can encompass as well parties and entities that have only some degree or measure of power. We have powerful entities (e.g., major corporations) and powerful individuals. In some cases, power is structurally embedded within the political economy; in other cases, power is situational and circumstantial. Political dictators in totalitarian states – with Hitle...