NCJ Number
177000
Date Published
1997
Length
104 pages
Annotation
Three essays provide information and analysis on "unconventional" crimes by researching arson, illegal fishing, and corporate crime in Atlantic Canada.
Abstract
The first essay provides a brief history of arson as a criminal law offense and its relation to property, particularly in the Canadian context; an examination of the social and legal processes that underpin a moral toleration of arson and contribute to an absence of censure and deterrence; and some concluding conjectures about the class patterning of arson in Nova Scotia. The author concludes that most contemporary fires in Nova Scotia involve the direct or indirect burning of one's own property rather than that of another. The continuing high rate of arson and monetary loss is directly attributed to the growing toleration of arson for stop-loss and profit in a Province that, outside Halifax and a few mainland centers, is caught in a seemingly endless series of economic crises. The second essay examines the myriad patterns of relationships that compose poaching in the lobster fishery of southwest Nova Scotia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first part of the essay discusses the scope of illegal fishing and the place of organized poaching; it provides a brief historical sense of fishing-related crime to the mid-1980s. Next, the essay considers the social organization of poaching activities, with attention to lobstering. Finally the author addresses poaching's complex relationship with the structure of law enforcement in its general sense: opportunities for illegality, preventive capabilities, modes of detection and surveillance, prosecution, and penalties. The conclusions suggest that variations within organizations of poaching are best viewed as associated with variations in the conditions of social control. The third essay focuses on the illegal conduct committed by corporate and state actors in one industry: steel production at the Sydney site in Nova Scotia from 1900 to the present, with attention to environmental law violations and to health and safety abuses. 264 references