This week and next week are a two-parter to round off the term; they both look at different aspects of radical victimology. Next week we'll be looking at ethnicity as a factor in crime, including crimes which aren't overtly racist in nature or motivation. This week we looked at corporate crime: crimes and other serious harms committed by businesses.
What these very different types of crime have in common is that they both take place against the backdrop of unequal power relations, which affect both the likelihood of becoming a victim of crime and the likelihood of gaining recognition as a victim. Businesses large and small have much more power over us than we do over them, and in some cases the power they have is exercised in unlawful ways: selling us sub-standard products, persuading us to buy insurance policies we can never claim on, ordering us to work excessive hours.
Even when it takes directly life-threatening forms, corporate crime has a tendency to remain invisible - "man crushed by machinery at workplace" may be an item on the local news but it won't make the national press, and it won't get into the crime statistics. Nobody knows how much law-breaking goes on in business. One reason for this is that business regulation - the main approach used to control commercial rule-breaking - has a strong orientation towards gaining compliance rather than prosecuting wrong-doers. Where prosecution is used, it is used as a last resort: inspectors will try to get managers to co-operate, then use the threat of prosecution to try and induce compliance. Actually taking a company to court is an implicit admission that other methods have failed, and is almost a punishment in itself.
As we saw in the seminar, there are good reasons for using this 'responsive', compliance-oriented approach: being treated with respect encourages managers and employees to commit themselves to the rules being enforced, rather than just treating them as a box-ticking exercise. The more punitive approach of prosecuting everything that can be prosecuted leads to stressed and demotivated staff, who only care about sticking to the rules because they're afraid they'll lose their jobs. (That's the theory, at any rate; in practice the results may be more mixed.) But even if it does produce better results, with less disruption, than a more punitive approach, there's a question-mark over the responsive approach when it comes to the victims of corporate crime.
Should corporate criminals always be prosecuted for the sake of doing justice to the victims? Or are the victims better served by regulation that leads to better practices being adopted, so that there are fewer victims in future?
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