Organizational Crime

Level of compliance - one of the most important prerequisites of good governance - varies widely across countries of the Global North and the less developed, Global South. Acts of non-compliance, such as electoral irregularities, dubious deals between private and public sectors, questionable role of the justice systems and financial scandals, though they vary greatly across countries, are an omnipresent reality of contemporary life. This volume has brought together a number of case studies of such deviant behavior in political, juridical and corporate fields, from several countries of Asia, Europe and South America, within a common framework. Instead of a moral approach based exclusively on the legality and illegality of the act, the authors of these essays dissect non-compliance analytically, taking culture and context into account. They argue that, while criminal and corrupt dealings deserve to be exposed by all means from an ethical point of view, seen from an interdisciplinary angle, one needs to probe deeper into the dynamic that leads to such non-compliance with the law in the first place.

This book presents the results of an international comparative study on the causes of rule deviation in business and medical organizations. Based on document and interview analyses as well as experiments, the discrepancy between (state) regulations and organizational practice is elaborated and discussed in an interdisciplinary perspective. On the basis of the distinction between organizational and individual deviance, it could be shown across national boundaries that the unwritten rules of the organization make a decisive contribution in explaining organizational wrongdoing, as well as their containment. Implications for effective prevention derived from this are also pointed out.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "The Organizational Aspects of Corporate and Organizational Crime" that was published in Administrative Sciences

This tenth volume in the Advances in Criminological Theory series is dedicated to the work of Albert J. Reiss, Jr. It focuses on the relationship between crime and social organization that is so central to his work. This focus rejects a view of crime solely as the action of atomistic individuals and sees the criminal justice system as inseparable from its social, political and organizational context. This perspective has had a resurgence in recent years, and this volume brings together some of the most important scholars who have contributed to these developments. Articles examine the social organization of crime itself, the context of crime, and the response to crime. The concept of co-offending, originally developed by Reiss, is explored both as a way of improving understanding of juvenile offending and as a framework for understanding patterns of criminal organization across crime types and the relationship of criminal to licit organization. Other articles recast social disorganization theory in light of recent theoretical and empirical developments. They argue for a version of control theory that incorporates internal, contextual, and state-focused dimensions. Organizational actors, both as offenders and as governmental agencies responding to crime, are explored. Building from Reiss's groundbreaking work on policing, a group of articles on policing examine organizational change through reorganization, the adoption of strategies such as community policing and the increased use of empirical evidence, complicated by routines, organizational culture and political constraints. Taken together, these works develop new connections between dimensions of social organization and renew the social organization perspective on crime and criminal justice. Contributors include: Diane Vaughan, Joan McCord, Kevin P. Conway, Elin Waring, Felton Earls, Beat Mohler, Peter Manning, Stephen Mastrofski, Lawrence Sherman, David Weisburd, Robert Sampson, David F. Greenberg, Margaret Kelley, Robin Tamarelli and Jeremy Travis.

A study and analysis of lack of enforcement against criminal actions in corporate America and what can be done to fix it. In the early 2000s, federal enforcement efforts sent white collar criminals at Enron and WorldCom to prison. But since the 2008 financial collapse, this famously hasn’t happened. Corporations have been permitted to enter into deferred prosecution agreements and avoid criminal convictions, in part due to a mistaken assumption that leniency would encourage cooperation and because enforcement agencies don’t have the funding or staff to pursue lengthy prosecutions, says distinguished Columbia Law Professor John C. Coffee. “We are moving from a system of justice for organizational crime that mixed carrots and sticks to one that is all carrots and no sticks,” he says. He offers a series of bold proposals for ensuring that corporate malfeasance can once again be punished. For example, he describes incentives that could be offered to both corporate executives to turn in their corporations and to corporations to turn in their executives, allowing prosecutors to play them off against each other. Whistleblowers should be offered cash bounties to come forward because, Coffee writes, “it is easier and cheaper to buy information than seek to discover it in adversarial proceedings.” All federal enforcement agencies should be able to hire outside counsel on a contingency fee basis, which would cost the public nothing and provide access to discovery and litigation expertise the agencies don't have. Through these and other equally controversial ideas, Coffee intends to rebalance the scales of justice. “Professor Coffee’s compelling new approach to holding fraudsters to account is indispensable reading for any lawmaker serious about deterring corporate crime.” —Robert Jackson, professor of Law, New York University, and former commissioner, Securities and Exchange Commission “A great book that more than any other recent volume deftly explains why effective prosecution of corporate senior executives largely collapsed in the post-2007–2009 stock market crash period and why this creates a crisis of underenforcement. No one is Professor Coffee’s equal in tying together causes for the crisis.” —Joel Seligman, author, historian, former law school dean, and president emeritus, University of Rochester

An introductory examination of the major crime groups in Canada, this text presents contemporary case studies and criminal justice policies to assess which enforcement strategies are best suited to control organised crime. Stephen Schneider provides readers with a broad understanding of the social, political, and economic forces that lead to the continued existence of organised criminal activities.

Ever dynamic, organized crime continues to change. For example, efforts to combat one aspect of the phenomenon, the American Mafia, have reached high levels of prosecutorial success -- resulting in a decline in the organization's relative importance. Meanwhile, criminal organizations operating on a global scale have become more sophisticated and more threatening, and additional crime groups have been added to the pantheon we refer to as organized crime. Reflecting changes that have occurred in recent years, this eleventh edition updates information and analyses of organized crime, including how criminal groups around the world are organized; the widening of their business activities; and the statutes, agencies, and techniques used to combat them. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

Corporate Crime, originally published in 1980, is the first and still the only comprehensive study of corporate law violations by our largest corporations. The book laid the groundwork for analyses of important aspects of corporate behavior. It defined corporate crime and found ways of locating corporate violations from various sources. It even drew up measures of the seriousness of crimes. Much of this book still applies today to the corporate world and its illegal behavior. A new introduction, "Corporate Crime: Yesterday and Today--A Comparison," prepared for this edition by coauthor Marshall B. Clinard, discusses the development of a criminological interest in corporate crime, explains the nature of corporate crime, and analyzes a number of issues involved in its study. Among the issues tackled are whether today's corporate crime is greater, more serious, and more complex; accounting fraud and its crucial role in hiding corporate crime; the pharmaceuticals, the industry with the most corporate violations; explanations of corporate crime in terms of economic factors, corporate culture, and the role of top executives; and new laws to control corporate crime and alternative approaches.