V. Criminal law is gradually changing. One of the reasons is that different societies continually review their ideas of what should and should not be considered a crime.

Sometimes governments “create new crimes” by identifying a form of behaviour and passing a new law to deal with it. Give examples of such re-evaluation of the concept of crime which have taken place or could take place in the near future.

VI. Read the following articles and explain the difference between white-collar crime and organised crime. Which of the two has a more serious impact upon the community? Can you establish any connection between them?

“White-collar” crime.

 

It is crime committed by persons of relatively high social or economic status in connection with their regular occupations. They are known as “white-collar” crimes after the typical attire of their perpetrators, such as business people, professionals and politicians.

White-collar crimes fall broadly into two categories: those illegal actions undertaken by perpetrators in the course of their occupation to make money for themselves; and those illegal actions undertaken principally to further the aims of their company or other organization. The most common crimes falling into the first category are embezzlement, misappropriation of funds, securities theft, bribery and kickbacks, insider trading, computer crime, and some types of fraud. (Tax fraud costs at least 5 percent of the gross national product in most developed countries.)

The second category of crimes comprises a vast variety of illegal practices by corporations and other organizations: 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; misrepresentation in advertising, unfair labour practices, health or safety violations in the workplace, income-tax law violations, and various financial manipulations. Examples also include bribing officials or falsifying reports of tests on pharmaceutical products to obtain manufacturing licenses; and constructing buildings or roads with cheap, defective materials while charging for components meeting full specifications. 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.

 

Often such activities are attributable to over-enthusiastic employees or executives acting on their own initiative, but sometimes they represent a form of "upperworld" organised crime. The cost of corporate crime in the United States has been estimated at $200,000,000,000 a year – three times the cost of organised crime. Such crimes have a huge impact upon the safety of workers, consumers, and the 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.

 

Organised crime.

 

It is a complex of highly centralized enterprises set up for the purpose of engaging in illegal activities. Although Europe and Asia have historically had their international rings of smugglers, jewel thieves, and drug traffickers, and Sicily and Japan have centuries-old criminal organizations, organised criminal activities operated as major industries are primarily a 20th-century phenomenon and are most prevalent in the United States. There organised crime has so vast an operation that it has been compared to a cartel of legitimate business firms.

The tremendous growth in crime in the United States during Prohibition (1920-33) led to the formation of a national organization. After repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment put an end to bootlegging – the practice of illegally manufacturing, selling, or transporting liquor – criminal overlords turned to other activities and became even more highly organised. The usual setup was a hierarchical one with different "families," or syndicates, in charge of operations in many of the major cities. At the head of each family was a boss who had the power of life and death over its members.

Wherever organised crime existed, it sought protection from interference by the police and the courts. Accordingly, large sums of money have been expended by syndicate bosses in an attempt to gain political influence on both local and national levels of government. Furthermore, profits from various illegal enterprises have been invested in legitimate business. In addition to the illegal activities--principally gambling and narcotics – that have been the syndicates' chief source of income, they may also engage in nominally legitimate enterprises, such as loan companies that charge usurious rates of interest and collect from delinquent debtors through threats and violence. They may also engage in labour racketeering, in which control is gained over a union's leadership so that the union's dues and other financial resources can be used for illegal enterprises. Real-estate firms, dry-cleaning establishments, waste-disposal firms, and vending-machine operations – all legally constituted businesses--when operated by the syndicate may include in their activities the elimination of competition through coercion, intimidation, and assassination. The hijacking of trucks carrying valuable, easily disposable merchandise is another favoured activity of organised crime.

In 1975 a federally sponsored study of such crime in the United States concluded that the total volume of activities controlled by organised crime amounted to more than $50,000,000,000 per year. The ability of organised crime to flourish in the United States rests upon several factors. One factor is the threats, intimidation, and bodily violence (including assassination) that a syndicate can bring to bear to prevent victims or witnesses (including its own members) from informing on or testifying against its activities. Jury tampering and the bribing of judges are other tactics used to prevent successful government prosecutions. Bribery and payoffs, sometimes on a systematic and far-reaching scale, are useful tools for ensuring that municipal police forces tolerate organised crime's activities. Another important contribution to the continuing prosperity of syndicate operations is that numbers rackets and other types of illegal gambling, which provide the economic base for some of the uglier forms of organised crime, are activities that many American citizens feel are not innately immoral or socially destructive and therefore deserve a certain grudging tolerance on the part of law-enforcement agencies.

 

1) Give the definitions for the following words and expressions: perpetrator, misappropriation of funds, kickback, insider trading, misrepresentation in advertising, Prohibition, bootlegging, usurious rate of interest, delinquent debtor, racketeering, coercion, intimidation, jury tampering.

2) Find a newspaper or magazine article describing a”white-collar” or organised crime and retell it in class.

3) What do you know about history of organised crime? What does Mafia mean?