White-collar crime

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ORGANIZED CRIME

In addition to that segment of the population made up of individual criminals acting independently or in small groups, there exists a so-called underworld of criminal organizations engaged in offenses such as organized vice (drugs, prostitution, pornography, loan-sharking, gambling), cargo theft, fraud, robbery, kidnapping for ransom, and the demanding of “protection” payments. [Loan-sharking is lending money at extremely high rates of interest.] In the United States and Canada, the principal source of income for organized crime is the supply of goods and services that are illegal but for which there is continued public demand. Organized crime in the United States is a set of shifting coalitions between groups of gangsters, business people, politicians, and union leaders. Many of these people have legitimate jobs and sources of income. In Britain groups of organized criminals have not developed in this way, principally because the supply and consumption of alcohol and opiates (a type of drug that contains opium and makes you want to sleep), gambling, and prostitution remain legal but partly regulated. This reduces the profitability of supplying such demands criminally. British crime organizations tend to be relatively short-term groups drawn together for specific projects, such as fraud and armed robbery, from a pool of professional criminals. Crime syndicates in Australia deal with narcotics, cargo theft and racketeering. [Syndicate is a group of people or companies who join together in order to achieve a particular aim. Racketeering is a dishonest way of obtaining money, such as by threatening people.] In Japan, there are gangs that specialize in vice and extortion. In many Third World countries, apart from the drug trade, the principal form of organized crime is black-marketeering, including smuggling and corruption in the granting of licenses to import goods and to export foreign exchange. Armed robbery, cattle theft, and maritime piracy and fraud are organized crime activities in which politicians have less complicity. Robbery is particularly popular and easy because of the availability of arms supplied to nationalist movements by those who seek political destabilization of their own or other states, and who may therefore exploit the dissatisfaction of ethnic and tribal groups.

Crimes committed by business people, professionals, and politicians in the course of their occupation are known as “white-collar” crimes, after the typical attire of their perpetrators. Criminologists tend to restrict the term to those illegal actions intended by the perpetrators principally to further the aims of their organizations rather than to make money for themselves personally. Examples include conspiring with other corporations to fix prices of goods or services in order to make artificially high profits or to drive a particular competitor out of the market; bribing officials or falsifying reports of tests on pharmaceutical products to obtain manufacturing licenses; and constructing buildings or roads with cheap, defective materials. The cost of corporate crime in the United States has been estimated at $200,000,000,000 a year. Such crimes have a huge impact upon the safety of workers, consumers, and he environment, but they are seldom detected. Compared with crimes committed by juveniles or the poor, corporate crimes are very rarely prosecuted in the criminal courts, and executives seldom go to jail, though companies may pay large fines. The term white-collar crime is used in another sense, by the public and academics, to describe fraud and embezzlement. Rather than being crime “by the firm, for the firm,” this constitutes crime for profit by the individual against the organization, the public, or the government. Tax fraud, for example, costs at least 5 percent of the gross national product in most developed countries. Because of the concealed nature of many frauds and the fact that few are reported even when discovered, the cost is impossible to estimate precisely. The economic cost of white-collar crime in most industrial societies is thought to be much greater than the combined cost of larceny, burglary, auto theft, forgery, and robbery.

Дата добавления: 2014-11-29