State Corporate Crime

Author: Rona Epstein

What are ‘safety crimes’? If you were to ask 100 people in the street to list, in their opinion, the five most serious crimes, probably in the vast majority of answers there will be no form of corporate crime. Corporate crime is not viewed as ‘real crime.’ Corporate crime is relatively invisible, yet crimes by corporations in pursuit of their legitimate goals cause death and injury on a wide scale. One sub-category of corporate crime - safety crimes - is the subject of this very interesting book by two academic members of the Centre for Corporate Accountability (Professor Tombs, Liverpool John Moores University; Dr Whyte, University of Liverpool).

Author: Dave Whyte

Markets for private military security are enjoying a period of sustained growth, during which there has been a repackaging of `mercenary outfits' and `private armies' as legitimate, fully incorporated private military companies (PMCs). This paper presents a critique of the dominant view of the new mercenaries and examines the regulation of private military security currently being proposed by the United Kingdom government, arguing that its purpose should be understood as the facilitation rather than the restraint of those markets. States are playing a formative role in the expansion of private military markets. In contrast to the dominant themes of the literature on globalization, the emergence of those markets should be understood as an expansion rather than a diminution of the coercive and violent capacities of states. Western states are facilitating new modes of delivering terror and violence that are also likely to increase, rather than reduce, the incidence of state-corporate crimes.

Authors: Clive Walker and David Whyte

This article analyses and explains the developing use of private military companies in the context of neoliberalism and will subject them to a critique based upon principals on constitutionalism. It will therefore explore the implications for democratic accountability of the expansion of the private military industry.

Authors: Steve Tombs and David Whyte

This paper documents the vulnerability of the UK workplace safety regime to ‘regulatory degradation’ . Following a brief overview of this regime, the paper examines the dominant arguments within academic literature on appropriate and feasible regulatory enforcement, arguing that the approaches to regulation thereby advocated have been easily degraded as a result of their compatibility with neoliberal economic strategy. A subsequent analysis of empirical trends within safety enforcement reveals a virtual collapse of formal enforcement, as political and resource pressures have taken their toll on the regulatory authority. Finally, the paper indicates that the increasing impunity with which employers can kill and injure is particularly problematic as we enter sustained economic recession, and underlines the urgent need for regulatory alternatives.