This essay will assess in detail on whether criminology should devote more attention towards corporate crime. In order to address this, it will look in detail at variety of different sources such as the work of Sutherland. This will evidently provide an ease of understanding for showing the different types of corporate crime which include consumer, environmental, employment and financial and the impact this has as a whole. Firstly, corporate crime was first defined by sociologist Sutherland (1939) as "a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation". He argues how criminology have failed to recognise that elite actors can ultimately construct how the law is applied. To expand, it is evident criminology has ignored Sutherland to a certain extent as a study by Wheeler (1976) only found 2.5% of books listed in the criminological index from 1945 to 1972 dealing with corporate criminality. Corporate crime provides a platform to show the high level of immorality in society. To clarify, it is difficult to gain concrete statistics of corporate crime, but more on a personal level it is self-righteous to punish such acts such as theft and street crime with discipline yet ignore and tolerate upper-class unethical behaviour even though it is more costly and damaging to the public. To elaborate, Pearce …show more content…
In a study by Greenpeace, it was found between 1999 and 2001 there were over 500 breaches of licences by 10 municipal waste incinerators, most involved the emission of dioxins. Only one of these breaches had been prosecuted. More recently In 2015, Volkswagen were involved in an emissions scandal, which involved installing software to cheat emission testing in order to display lower emissions of what the car was actually putting