The Greatest Threat To Our Social Fabric
It's not China, It's Not Russia, it's not immigration, it's not drugs
“[Although people] are more likely to experience victimization from the organizational and institutional offenses of the powerful than from the erratic and atomized offenses of the powerless, most people are still concerned about the latter and are in the dark about the former.” -Greg Barak, 2015
Children are afraid of the boogeyman under their bed. Late-night walks invite fear of a man in a hood lurking in the shadows. Images of criminals are burned into our minds from popular television shows, movies, and the news. The image in our minds of a criminal is a shadowy figure who preys on us at night, breaks into our homes, violates our rights and freedoms, and must be stopped.
We fear crime to the point where we engage in drastic measures to protect ourselves from it. Every society must have a villain, and it has been noted by Emile Durkheim that society does well when it can band together against a common enemy–who better than criminals? In response to crime we employ nearly two million police and correctional officers, arming them to the teeth to defend us against our perceived dangers.
Edwin Sutherland, a famous criminologist and the father of the term “white collar crime,” took issue with society’s choice for its “criminal.” He found that the criminals society chose to pursue were of low socioeconomic status, and had few resources to protect themselves from a society that viewed them as inherently dangerous. He was concerned that as a society we were missing the mark of what real crime actually was. We became afraid of mythological depictions of crime. We began to fear aspects of crime that were rare, and allowed ourselves to fall victim to much more serious criminal scandals. Whereas the poor in our communities found themselves overpoliced and overly represented in prisons, those with more resources to command were able to beat prison and convictions. They avoided the freedom of the stigma of criminal records, and their actions, while malicious and damaging, are frequently unpunished in a system that is built to pursue the poor and rarely the wealthy.
The American corporation can be the brewing ground for the most heinous criminal acts, and the larger the corporation the greater the potential damage. These entities depend on lax systems of enforcement, regulators and policymakers who answer their call, and a forgetful public to routinely exploit, at times fatally, the public for the highest profits possible.
Speaking conservatively, as academics often do, it is estimated that corporate crime inflicts economic damage at the rate of $400-500 billion per year, or $30 for every $1 of street crime economic damage. In 2014 the financial damage of all street crime was about $14.3 billion, which can be compared to major corporate scandals such as Enron’s collapse, which cost shareholders $74 billion in the four years leading to its fall.
C. Wright Mills likens corporate crime to crimes of “higher immorality,” more heinous than street crime in upending our nation’s social fabric. For every one death caused by homicide, seven are caused by a variety of corporate-related deaths including deaths on the job, environmental pollution (illegal dumping), and particularly heinous causes such as the recommendation of unnecessary surgeries.
Many angles of white collar crime go undiscussed, but I am going to discuss a particularly gross double standard on the note of corporate criminality, one in which we all share responsibility. Corporations, even those who have been found in severe violation of the law, enjoy tremendous anonymity from prosecution and accountability, both in criminal courts and in courts of public opinion. Shielded by armies of public relations specialists, corporations are free to masquerade as righteous entities while living with forgotten criminal histories.
A Gross Double Standard: A Lack Of Charges, Prosecutions, And Convictions
A criminal record is a virtual branding upon one’s character, one that many will carry with them for the rest of their lives. Convictions come with sentences to fines, jail, prison, or some form of supervision like probation, but they also come with a brand. Felons will never enjoy the same rights as full American citizens, so long as they carry the mark of a felon. Corporations rarely feel such public wrath.
Crimes at the corporate level are rare, as these are often handled often in civil court or with the absence of a trial at all. Less than 10 percent of all federal criminal cases involve corporate crime, and less than 6 percent of inmates in federal prison are there for such offenses. Corporations, rather than face police raids, trials, and criminal convictions, send their teams of lawyers to work with prosecutors and the justice department to reach deferred prosecution agreements, which save the defendants the difficulties of trial and possible time in jail. DPAs act as a period of supervision, where as long as the corporation complies with rules set forward in the agreement, all charges are dropped.
Politics play a role in the lack of charges. There is a distinct lack of prosecutors who specialize in corporate crime. American politicians, such as Rudi Giuliani started their careers as white-collar criminal prosecutors. It is an effective way for politicians to begin their careers, as it is popular with the people. However, once in power, it is unwise to bite the hand that feeds you, and politicians like Giuliani change their tune to street level crime–the safe bet when your main donors might very well be the ones you need to pursue.
As with politicians, the media have little interest in pursuing corporate crime. Once in a while, when scandals become too much to bear, they will cover them. Bernard Madoff, for instance, committed blatant scandals and made obvious contradictions prior to his arrest and sentence to 150 years in prison; the issue was that no one bothered to investigate him, and the media never covered his scandals until it drew immense public scrutiny. We have multiple national frameworks for measuring rates of street crime, but no such database for measuring corporate crime; we have streamlined, high-budget organizations for policing different types of street crime. In regards to corporate crime, a mess of agencies with little true enforcement power flounder at the prospect of bringing corporations to justice.
We Don’t Understand Corporate Crime
For a crime to be committed at the street level, two facts must be proven. First, a “guilty act,” one that violates a law, must have occurred. In criminal justice we call this actus reus. If we can establish actus reus, we must then establish criminal intent, or what we call mens rea. There is an issue with corporate crime, however: establishing actus reus is difficult. Corporations are giant entities and in the face of major scandals it is difficult to hone blame on a single guilty party. Instead, the entity itself, through its competitive, profit-seeking drive, is guilty at a macro level of the violations, and not individuals that can be punished. Companies that are negligent in ways that lead to a loss of human life are not set up for criminal prosecutions that can establish criminal intent. Thus, when a corporation leaves a prescription on the market after they are aware it is unsafe, they are typically fined instead of charged with homicide.
Edwin Sutherland disagreed with the notion that corporations were merely engaging in negligible practices, however. He studied complaints against the 70 largest corporations in America, examining issues spanning 45 years. He found that major corporations were habitually recidivating, and were serial criminal offenders. A lack of proper enforcement allows corporations to get away with murder and keep killing.
The US System Is Built To Favor Wealthy Criminals
What group of criminals get to say that they are committing the most damaging crimes to a country while still writing the laws? It’s not autocrats, it’s not terrorist organizations, it's American corporations. Those with resources thrive in American courts. Expert legal teams, a complete absence of criminal statutes, politicians who know they must be your friend–it is the perfect system to overly criminalize street-level offenders and ignore corporate crime.
Much of the white collar crime is undetectable by any existing measure we have, as much of it cannot even be labeled criminal. When Nestle sold baby formula in countries where there was no fresh water, clean equipment, or money for the expensive milk replacement, tens of thousands of children lost their lives. Marketing practices can be so terrible at times, like this one, that they combine racism, fear, anxiety, coercive strategies, and lies together to put profits over people, even when it costs babies their lives. Nestle dressed women as nurses and sent them to hospitals to supply samples of formula to new mothers; they provided hospitals with ample formula supplies; and they designed nursery wards in hospitals to be far from mothers. Why? To make it more difficult for mothers to breastfeed and try to dry up milk supplies to create a formula dependency. It was (and still is) sick and evil, but here’s the worst part. The best the United Nations and Unicef could do was create a set of voluntary guidelines to try and get formula companies to follow. According to the video linked above, Nestle only follows a little more than half of the guidelines today.
Despite the atrocities, Nestle continues to be one of the largest corporations in America today. There were no FBI raids on Nestle headquarters, even after the extent of their horrors became public knowledge. Even when this information became public knowledge, few bothered to learn about it. If we as a society claim to care about babies and children, where was the justice for the mothers and families all around the world subject to Nestle’s predatory practices? There was none. There was no Tim Ballard to rescue those children. There was no justice department to prosecute. And there was no public to demand real accountability. Today most of America has forgotten about this dark chapter in corporate history, and they haven’t bothered to remember many others.
Dispelling The Greatest Myth Of Crime
The news, politicians, and powers in American society would have you believe that the greatest criminal threat comes from tents and sleeps on the street. They may warn of other great threats “invading” from across our southern border, or perhaps preparing for another attack on democracy from the Middle East. they may tell you that you are unsafe from the shadowy figure of crime; they may warn you that there are rapists and serial killers around every corner. The issue is they have missed the mark. The greatest killers in our society and the greatest threat to our social fabric is not the terrorist, immigrant, or homeless. It is the unchecked corporation. It is the agency that is held to no account, that controls the flow of information, and is the creator of laws–it can simply write no law to penalize itself.
Remember this: most myths about crime overexaggerate a problem to create fear and keep the population’s attention up. White collar or corporate crime myths do the opposite. They dispel fears of the criminal elements within corporations, while directing that fear back toward the desired places: street level crime. They do this, despite corporate crime causing harm to our society at a rate 30-times higher than street level crime.