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Corporate Crime
   So far, in these lectures, we’ve been looking at crimes like robbery and murder—both from a historical viewpoint and also in contemporary society—and we’ve seen that the preoccupation in Western society with crime and with lawlessness is part of a long and continuous tradition, rather than something which is new and unique to modern society.
   But over the past seventy years or so, fllthere has been a massive increase in one type of crime, which is what’s known as "corporate crime". Corporate crime is crime which, as the name suggests, is connected with companies, with business organisations. It has been relatively ignored by the mass media—for example, it tends to be under-reported in comparison with conventional crime in news broadcasts, and in crime serials and films and so on—they very rarely deal with corporate crime. And it also tends to be ignored in academic circles—there’s been far more research on conventional crime and far more data is available.
   There are several reasons for this lack of interest in corporate crime, compared with other types of crime. It’s often very complex, whereas with conventional crime it’s usually possible to follow what’s going on without specialist knowledge. As well as this, whereas conventional crime usually has a lot of human interest corporate crime often has much less. The third reason, and possibly the most significant one, is that very often the victims are unaware—they think their misfortune is an accident or that it’s the fault of no-one in particular. They’re unaware that they’ve been victims of a crime.
   So, when we look at the effects of corporate crime we may find it’s very difficult to assess the costs. But these costs can be very considerable in both their economic and social aspects.
   Let’s look at the economic costs first. For example, if a company is producing fruit juice and it dilutes its product so that it’s just a little below the concentration it should be, many millions of people may be paying a small amount extra for their carton of orange juice.
   Now small amounts like this may seem insignificant for individual customers—too small to worry about—but for the company this deception might result in massive illegal profit. However, all studies of corporate crime agree that the individuals are in fact deprived of far more money by such crime than they are by conventional crime like robbery and theft.
   In addition to this, we have to consider the social costs of corporate crime and these are again very difficult to assess, but they are considerable. They’re important because they can undermine the faith of the public in the business world and also, more importantly, because the main group of people they affect are, in fact, not the richer sections of society but the poorer—so here companies are robbing the poor to benefit the rich.