What are ‘crimes of the powerful’?
In this lecture I’ll explain where this term came from, how it includes both state crime and
corporate crime, and give some definitions and examples.
The term ‘crimes of the powerful’ was coined by the British sociologist, Frank Pearce in 1976.
It was the title of his book which was a Marxist analysis of the corporate abuse of power.
The book highlighted the way that the sociology and criminology up to that point had largely failed
to study the role of the state, corporations and the ruling class in criminal activity.
The term ‘crimes of the powerful’ refers to crimes that are committed by ‘state institutions and
private business organizations or corporations.’
Crimes committed by states can include illegal war, genocide, terrorism, torture and assassination.
They can also include corruption, bribery, theft of public assets, illegal surveillance of their populations, arbitrary arrest, detainment and
imprisonment of citizens, and illegal break-ins to people’s houses.
The study of state or government crime has been a relatively neglected topic in sociology and criminology.
This has been the case for at least three main reasons.
First, it is difficult for researchers to gain access to politically powerful office holders inside the state or government to study their activities.
Second, the types of crime and harm caused to people by members of the government or in the name of the state are often complex.
They may also be at arm’s length from those who order them so that there is murkiness about the
ultimate responsibility for the crime or the possibility of plausible denial by those in charge.
Third, many members of society think that the state is there to protect them from crime and so there is denial and public resistance to the idea
that the state itself might be run by criminals or be acting in a criminal way.
According to the sociologist David Whyte, the ‘Crimes committed by states and corporations undoubtedly do kill more people, maim more
people, rip off and steal from more people than crimes committed by individuals.’
One calculation is that in the course of the 20th century, governments around the world have murdered roughly 262 million people.
This figure does not include people who died in wars (about 35 million people), or the killing of criminals or armed opponents.
Government officials also make a major contribution to property crime, such as asking for
bribes, which is one of the most common ways people are victimised in developing countries.
Property crimes by political elites can also be on a massive scale.
For example, Sani Abacha, the former dictator of Nigeria, was accused of stealing $4 billion from his people, an amount higher than the value of all
the loss and damage caused by residential and commercial burglaries in England and Wales in a year.
Recently, the US government, through the CIA, operated an ‘extraordinary rendition’ program
where people suspected of terrorism were kidnapped, taken to ‘black sites’ outside the United States and subjected to interrogation involving
abuse and torture in violation of domestic and international law.
At least fifty-four foreign governments participated in this program, including leading
democratic states, such as the UK, Canada, Denmark and Sweden.
Australia was involved, too, even though its name was blacked out of an official US Senate Intelligence Committee report on the issue.
confirmed that an Australian official had witnessed him being tortured.
‘Crimes of the powerful’ also include corporate crimes.
Corporate crime can be defined as the illegal and harmful activity that is carried out by corporations
either to maximise their benefits and advantages or to minimise their losses and disadvantages.
Corporate crimes can be committed against shareholders, such as financial fraud.
They can be committed against workers, such as industrial manslaughter.
Customers can be victims, such as false advertising or dangerous consumer goods.
Local communities can often be victims, too, such with pollution and the dumping of hazardous waste.
So too can the government, such as with corruption or tax evasion.
Other businesses are not exempt, such as with price fixing or industrial espionage.
The idea of corporate criminality is not in itself especially new.
In the nineteenth century, for example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, wrote about the various
crimes committed by capitalist firms in their mistreatment of workers, damage to the environment and financial swindles.
The current conception of corporate crime, however, can be traced back to the work of the US sociologist, Edwin H. Sutherland, in the 1940s.
He introduced the concept of ‘white collar crime’, and encouraged criminologists to study the work-
related crimes of apparently respectable white- collar workers.
In 1949, Sutherland published his book White Collar Crime which focussed on the law breaking
behaviour of the seventy largest US corporations in mining, manufacturing and mercantile operations.
All of the corporations had multiple legal decisions made against them for a range of offences,
patent infringement, restraint of trade and unfair labour practices.
Sutherland found that their crimes were ‘rational, deliberate, persistent, and much more extensive than [the] prosecution of them indicated.’
Another researcher, Russell Mokhiber, discovered similar patterns of corporate crime in his research.
At the end of the 1990s, he compiled a list of the top 100 corporate criminals of the previous
decade which he published on the Corporate Crime Reporter website.
To make the list, corporations had to have pleaded ‘guilty or no contest to crimes and ... been criminally fined.’
The companies on the list had committed crimes in a wide range of different areas to do with food
and drugs, the environment, finance, worker death and public corruption.
The top corporate offender on the list was the Swiss pharmaceutical company F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd.
It pleaded guilty to organising a worldwide conspiracy to raise and fix the price of vitamins and to determine the market shares of certain
vitamins sold in the United States and other countries.
It was fined $500 million for this crime.
Second on the list was the Daiwa Bank Ltd.
It pleaded guilty to sixteen federal felonies to do with covering up trading losses in securities, and
attempting to deceive and defraud the bank regulators.
It was fined $340 million.
Mokhiber also found that six corporations in the top 100 list were criminal recidivists during the 1990s.
That is, they were repeat criminal offenders.
He wrote that few Americans would have realised that when they filled up their cars at an Exxon petrol station or took a cruise on a Royal
Caribbean Cruise Line ship, that they were supporting criminal recidivist corporations.
Like state crimes, the study of corporate crime, has been relatively neglected in sociology and criminology, for the following reaons.
First, corporate crimes are often complex, multifaceted and involve people with different
responsibilities in different parts of the corporation.
It can be difficult to clearly determine the responsibilities for the crime.
This is known as ‘the problem of many hands’.
Second, it can be difficult for researchers to obtain access to relevant staff and records.
This can be for privacy reasons, because the corporation is obstructive or because records
and staff time are needed first by various enforcement or regulatory agencies which are also investigating the crime.
Third, researchers have to be able to learn the language, logic and modus operandi of corporations to understand their business
operations and the way their business transactions occur.
Finally, it is often easier for researchers to obtain research funding for the study of conventional crime than for corporate crime.
It can be argued, though, that the crimes of powerful are more harmful, many times over, than the crimes to which most attention is paid, and
that they are actually a far more significant subject for sociological study.