Crime and globalisation
The global criminal economy
- Held et al suggests that there has been a globalisation of crime, and the increasing interconnectedness of crime across national borders, and the spread of transnational organised crime.
- Castells argues there is a global criminal economy of over £1 trillion per annum
- The drugs trade is worth $300-400 billion annually at street prices. Money laundering of the profits from organised crime is estimated to be at $1.5 trillion annually.
Global risk consciousness
- Globalisation has increased the scope of risk e.g. migrants and asylum seekers in the West.
- The result is usually tighter border controls.
Globalisation, capitalism and crime
- Taylor argues that globalisation had led to grater inequality.
- TNCs can now swith their factories to low wage countries, producing job insecurity and unemployment at home.
- Deregulation have little control over their own economies and state spending on welfare has declined.
- This had produced patterns in crime .
- Poorer people turn to crime as a result of insecurity e.g. drug trade.
- Among the elite, globalisation allows large scale criminal opportunities e.g. deregulation of financial markets creates opportunities for insider trading and tax evasion.
- New employment patterns creates opportunities for crime e.. hiring illegal workers.
- Rothe and Friedrichs argue that the IMF commits crimes of globalisation by imposing pro-capitalist ‘structural adjustment programs’ on poor countries, requiring them to cut public spending and causing unemployment.
Patterns of criminal organisation
Glocal organisation
- Hobbs and Dunningham says crime and globalisation is linked, it involves individuals acting as a ‘hub’ around which a loose-knit network forms, often linking legitimate and illegitimate
- Different from the rigid mafia style from the past.
- New forms have global links crime is still rooted at local context, this leads to a conclusion of a glocal system – locally based, but with global connections.
McMafia
- Glenny examined McMafia – organisation that emerged from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe states after the fall of Communism in 1989.
- The Russian government deregulated much of the economy, leading to huge price increases in food and rents.
- However, prices for Oil, gas and metals were kept at old soviet prices – way below the world market prices. Thus, well connected citizens with access to large funds could buy these up very cheaply and sell them on the world market.
- The elite became known as ‘oligarchs’
- To protect them from disorder, they hired new ‘mafias’ which were vital for the entry of the new Russian capitalist class into the world economy.
Green Crime
- Crime that harms the environment, including to non-humans.
Global risk society
- Beck argues that most threats to human well-being and the eco-system are now human-made rather than natural disaster.
- In late modern society, the massive increase in productivity and technology has created new, manufactured risks.
- Many of these involve harm to the environment and have serious consequences for humanity e.g. climate change.
- These risks are increasingly global scale, s Beck describes late modern society as ‘global risk society’.
Green Criminology
Types of Green Crime
- Smart identifies two types of green crime:
- Primary green crime – Directly from the destruction and degradation of the earths resources. South identifies four main primary crimes: air pollution, deforestation, species decline and water pollution.
- Secondary green crime – flouting the rules aimed a regulating environmental disasters.
State Crime
- Green and Ward define state crime as ‘illegal or deviant acts perpetrated by, or wit the complicity of state agencies.
- McLaughin identifies four categories of state crime:
- Economic
- Social/Cultural
- Police Forces.
Scale of state crime
- Cambodia between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge government killed 1/5 of the country’s population.
- The state power means it can conceal their crime more easier, this is because the state defines what a crime is and manages the CJS.
- Principle of national sovereignty makes it difficult for organisations such as the UN to intervene or apply international conventions against genocide, war crime etc.
Case Studies on state crime.
- Genocide in Rwanda – 800,000 Tutsi were murdered by the Hutsi backed militia.
- State corporate crime – state crimes are often committed in conjunction with corporate crime, Kramer and Michalowski distinguish:
- State-initiated corporate crime – when state initiate, direct or approve corporate crimes e.g. Challenger disaster.
- State-facilitated corporate crime – when state fail to regulate and control corporate behaviour, making crime easier e.g. Deepwater Horizon disaster
Explaining state crime
- Adorno et al – ‘authoritarian personality’ – Nazis .
- Modernity – Bauman argues the four features of modern society made the Nazi Holocause possible, division of labour, bureaucratisation, instrumental rationality and science and technology.