Author: Edited by Gregg Barak
ISBN No: 9780415741262
Review date: 19/04/2024
No of pages: 556
Publisher: Routledge
Publisher URL:
https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415741262
Year of publication: 24/07/2015
Brief:
The Routledge International Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful Edited by Gregg Barak
price
£125
A collection of essays on ‘the crimes of the powerful’ are as interesting as a fashion in the thinking of academics as for what they say, writes Mark Rowe.
The Routledge International Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful is edited by Gregg Barak and has 38 chapters.
These criminologists cover plenty of ground, and not only most of the world. They cover: organised crime (and official acceptance of criminal syndicates); hacking; . writing of corporate crime, environmental crime, state crime (and it goes on) have a point. Economic sanctions are broken, land gets polluted, banks and whole economies melt. Yet is the US retailer Walmart criminal? It has two chapters here: one that casts doubt on the business’ ‘sustainability initiative’, and one a more general attack on the ‘retail behemoth’ for suppressing unions, putting profits first and exploiting factory workers in its supply chain. Other multi-nationals featured are oil firms BP and Shell, including for fracking (a straight crime, according to this work’s introduction) and creating spills, such as Deepwater Horizon by BP in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010; mining companies in Latin America; firms that corrupt government officials to make deals; and factory farming, ‘a moral crime against animals’, so we are told. While there’s academic bashing of business going on here, in fairness the authors identify ‘powerful criminals’ in government too, such as France, for training the Argentine military that went on to fight a ‘Dirty War’ against its own people in the 1970s. Also given a chapter are Australian border police, or in the words of the Australian criminologist, ‘a crimogenic border policing regime’.
We can put this down to in part a power grab by academic criminology; they want to make as much as possible their territory, whether victimology and surveillance (each study areas in themselves), genocide, ecocide, high finance (or ‘Wall Street looting’ as the editor of the collection, an American professor of criminology, puts it).
Partly, it’s political. For every crime by the powerful, there are victims, the powerless. The academic writers don’t like ‘persistent corporate-financial scandals’, ‘state-corporate collusion in perpetuating harm’, and ‘bad banks’, to take three charges from random chapters; and a lack of official effort to address root causes, thanks to – according to their explanation of the world we live in – neo-liberal economics, globalisation, and so forth.
In fairness, there’s plenty of material to justify the assault mounted on ‘the powerful’ as self-interested, greedy and ‘crimogenic’ (a popular word among these writers). They are correct to point out – and are rectifying – how little the ‘crimes of the powerful’ are studied. There are many insights – such as, the frauds cases that do get publicised, such as ‘rogue traders’ are actually by individuals against the powerful.
This new book has the same fault as the one reviewed in the July 2015 issue of Professional Security, The corporate criminal: why corporations must be abolished, by Steve Tombs and David Whyte. Both are published by Routledge. Both don’t do enough to investigate the difference between the individual wrong-doer – the insider dealer, the offerer of bribes to win a contract, the corner-cutter who causes or allows to happen an environmental disaster – and the organisation that they work for or represent. It’s telling that the cover picture of this ‘Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful’ shows four people in shadow in the light of business skyscrapers. It’s as if to illustrate that there is some connection between the men (usually men) shaking hands and doing deals, and the buildings and companies that they are inside. But what? It’s seldom investigated; rather, the authors use open source material and rail against wrongs as ‘crimogenic’ – what does the user of that term actually mean, other than as a smear? Are the wrong-doers free agents, or are they ‘only obeying orders’ whether of superiors (is ’tone from the top’ important, as counter-fraud specialists stress?) or a corporate or other culture? It’s hard, as some of the authors say, to describe the networks of powerful people – which does make this book and others like it welcome. On the other hand, you don’t bribe a company, a government or a police force – you bribe an individual (who then may have to give his own bribes to others, to allow something through or to make something happen or not happen; there’s the network).
As for many of the cases in this handbook, no-one’s denying that Enron was a fraud, or that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was bad, and that the details show those concerned in a poor light. And many of the authors point to official collusion and cover-up and a lack of mainstream media focus to show up ‘the powerful’; such as the so-called ‘ag-gag’ laws in some US states that make it a crime to record inside factory farms without permission, to make the animal welfare campaigner the criminal, not the farmer hurting the animal. But were that oil spill, the way that Australia secures its borders, or the collapse of banks in the 2008 crash, crimes? Is the efficient farmer, even if he’s cruel to animals, doing a crime? And even if they were criminals, how helpful is that – assuming you can pin the criminal responsibility on someone rather than an organisation (which takes us back to the need to differentiate the individual who does things from whatever organisation that employs him)? To prosecute the powerful you have to create a ream of laws – which will have to be international, which takes us back to politics; and how practical is it to propose a global body of law, with enforcers and prisons? In fairness to what is a wide-ranging book, the chapter on ‘genocide and crimes of the powerful’ that covers the Holocaust, and ‘forgotten genocides’, massacres since, raises this question. If you bring individuals to trial for their acts, are you shifting attention (and moral responsibility and lessons) away from the ‘extermination system’, the deep reach of evil, and the ‘widespread complicity’. Who is accountable? And who says so?
This handbook and others are raising profound questions about business – and about everyday life, for corruption, fracking and Walmart and all these other subjects affect people. But how useful is it to treat these subjects in terms of crime? Other than to allow academics to let off steam about big businesses and other things they evidently don’t like?
Visit https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415741262.
(For The Corporate Criminal, Why Corporations Must Be Abolished – visit https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415556378.)
