Corporate crimes involve crimes committed by business entities or individuals within their occupations for their organization's advantage. State crimes are illegal activities committed by state agencies, including the government. There are rampant corporate and state crimes both in the US and globally. This paper focuses on summarizing peer-reviewed articles that describe corporate and state crimes.
According to Boman & Gallupe (2020), the mandatory lockdown orders issued in response to COVID-19 have led to a reduced crime rate. They suggest that while petty crimes have reduced, large crimes such as homicide remain unchanged. The authors show that the decrease in the crime rate has resulted from the reduced minor crimes mostly committed by co-offenders, usually the peer groups. The reason is that lockdown has restricted young people from meeting their peers and placing them in opportunities to commit serious crimes. Crimes that do not require co-offenders, such as battery and IPV, have increased. The increasing crimes are, however, costly to the country as they are hard to recover from. Therefore, the country should not celebrate from the reports that crime rates have reduced in the wake of COVID-19 as serious crimes continue to escalate.
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Greife & Maume (2020) analyze corporate environmental crimes using datasets from the governmental ecological agencies. According to the authors, the data analysis has challenges, including lack of unit of analysis, data accessibility, formatting the data, finding the relevant data, and the time frame for the collected data. In curbing the challenges in compiling the court datasets, the authors suggest considering the unit of analysis for the researchers seeking the data regarding firms. Direct requests for data may also be made to the agencies using the Freedom of Information Act. Researchers should also spend time on manually translating data for straightforward interpretation. The cases should also be drawn from various years due to the time frame challenge. The data set may be built from the Corporate Prosecution Registry, which tracks corporate convictions, pleas, the deferred, and the no-prosecution agreements to curb challenges. There are variations in the punishments across firms found to violate the environment. The authors suggest that when companies are fined for violating the environmental laws, they are unlikely to lay off their employees or go out of their business, contrary to many companies' claims.
Patten (2019) investigates the water violations using the state-corporate crime perspective guided by Kramer and Michalowski's theoretical model. There is a study of the effects of motivation, control, and opportunities of the companies' environmental crimes. The author indicates that motivation is the leading factor for the increase in water violations. The motivations include the liquidity of a company and the incentives to violate, which increase the crime rates. An increase in a company's liquidity led to more than four times the overall average violation rate. Providing incentives for companies with friendly practices that do not pollute the environment has been found to reduce crime rates. Therefore, the prevention of corporate environmental crimes will require lower crime actions while reducing the incentives for the violations. The motivations for environmentally conducive practices should be increased. The opportunities and control were found to have no difference in affecting the crime rate.
Comack (2018) discusses Canada as both a capitalist and a colonialist society using the critical criminology approach. The author reveals the manifestations of crimes for those who are robust against the Indigenous people. The past decades' corporate crimes include the treaties between the European and the Indigenous by the corporates to appropriate their lands, which are seen as "permitted theft." By the 1870s, most of the Indigenous people did not have a source of food, shelter, and clothing, and tools. Another crime is the Indian Act, which violated the Indigenous people's differents to govern their lives as agreed in the treaty. The Act regarded the society and the Indians as inferior. Besides, the residential school system was created with an intention to undermine Indigenous peoples is another crime. The corporate colonial crimes are presently evident as Canada's reserves are the poorest in the country while the Indigenous people live in poverty. Children who attended the residential schools were also separated from their families. The relation between the Indigenous people, the state of Canada, and the corporate capital show the mechanisms of power lead to social injustices. There have been various resistance forms from the Indigenous people in defense of their land, waterways protection, and mobilizing others to take action.
Barberi, Gibbs, & Schally (2019) discuss the killing of K9 dogs. They suggest that the dogs are at a threat of getting killed due to the work's dangerous nature. The causes of dogs' death include exhaustion from heat during summer, which may be avoided by holding the officers involved responsible for neglect. Other accidental deaths include falls, vehicle accidents, drowning, and accidents during their training. The dogs may also die due to being exposed to toxins and illnesses from their work environment. There are, however, intentional deaths that are caused by stabbing and being caught up in gunfire. The loss of dogs is costly as they are expensive to purchase and train while their lives matter. In reducing the number of deaths, the authors suggest that officers should be charged with neglect to ensure that they take care of the K9 dogs in the line of duty. There should also be standardized measures to alert the police officers when the temperatures are too high for the dogs so that immediate action can be taken. In protecting the dogs from being injured during the gunfire, they should be dressed in police vests.
References
Barberi, D., Gibbs, J. C., & Schally, J. L. (2019). K9s were killed in the line of duty. Contemporary Justice Review , 22 (1), 86-100. https://doi.org/10.1080/10282580.2019.1576128
Boman, J. H., & Gallupe, O. (2020). Has COVID-19 changed crime? Crime Rates in the United States during the pandemic. American journal of criminal justice , 45 (4), 537-545. 10.1007/s12103-020-09551-3
Comack, E. (2018). Corporate Colonialism and the “Crimes of the Powerful” Committed Against the Indigenous Peoples of Canada. Critical Criminology , 26 (4), 455-471. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10612-018-9414-y
Greife, M. J., & Maume, M. O. (2020). Stealing Like Artists: Using Court Records to Conduct Quantitative Research on Corporate Environmental Crimes. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice , 1043986220931631. https://doi.org/10.1177/1043986220931631
Patten, D. (2019). Motivations, opportunities, and controls of environmental crime: an empirical test of Kramer and Michalowski’s integrated theoretical model of state-corporate crime. Crime, Law, and Social Change , 72 (2), 195-210. DOI: 10.1007/s10611-019-09811-2
