The Importance Of Corporate Crime

Register to read the introduction… Academics find it difficult to analyze corporate crime because large scale survey data is not available so researchers have to rely on non-objective crime statistics collected by ‘impartial’ government agencies such as StatsCan or the Home Office which usually yield tiny samples (Snider, 2005; pg 186). Corporations do not want sociologist investigating their business practises, unlike traditional offenders they have the ability to resist such incursions. On the other hand, the justice department for the most part has an inadequate budget for investigated let alone prosecuting corporate crimes. Police agencies cannot keep up with the geographic bounders of victimization, the mobility of the offenders and the complexities of the crimes because they usually involve investigating and prosecuting at the same time and also extensive knowledge of the corporate infrastructure which policing agencies, for a reason, are not equipped for (Schlegel et al., 1999; pg 15). According to Marxism, the law is developed and implemented by the elites to control the working class and crime is a product of class-based inequality, the policing agencies are funded by the government which are heavily influenced by the elites therefore, conflict theory asserts that criminal law is designed to target the working class in order to protect the …show more content…
However when it comes to crimes of marketing unsafe products, maintaining unsafe workplaces, defrauding workers, dumping toxic waste, misrepresenting the benefits or not disclosing the risks of products- criminal law does not work. According to Marxism, this is because criminal law is created to protect the interests of the elite and to control the working class from breaking out of the cycle of inequality created by the capitalist neoliberal claims. Breaking out of the cycle or disobeying its elements means committing a crime, criminal law is then a form of social control. Deviance and crime represent conflicts in society which are managed by the suppression of the ‘ruled by the rulers’. The public is unaware of the crimes because of the massive lobbying by corporations, elite investment in scientific, sociological and political knowledge claims, neutralizations of corporate incidents, decriminalization of corporate ‘wrongdoings’ and the generally invisibility of corporate crime. This then leads the public to believe that corporate crime is not a threat to society or their means of living. Also, the rare incidents that are available to public knowledge are deemed as ‘natural’ incidents that occur from time to time because of the competitive nature of neoliberal capitalism. Conversely, elites have invested in convincing the public that ‘street crimes’ are committed by the working class;