NCJ Number
220691
Date Published
2007
Length
270 pages
Annotation
This book is the first text in the discipline of criminology to explore safety crimes as a proper and legitimate focus of analysis.
Abstract
According to this book, safety crimes are a significant crime problem, however, political, social, legal, and regulatory processes combine to obscure their nature, extent, scale, and consequences. The book’s purpose and focus is to explore and expose the links between boardroom behavior and deaths and injuries at work; the information spanned a broad range of disciplines, from business to criminal law, industrial relations to industrial safety, and economics to sociology. The complexity of safety crime is that the location of the crime of violence is the only distinguishing factor from other acts of violence; being hurt at work is not recognized as a crime of violence. Chapter 1 introduces the parameters of safety crimes. Chapter 2 maps occupational deaths and injuries, using various data to indicate the scale and distribution. Chapter 3 assesses the presence, power, and significance of a series of related arguments which cast safety crimes as accidents. Chapter 4 examines the extent to which the scale of offending from the pool of death and injury can be estimated. Chapter 5 describes through a historical focus, the development of criminal law in ways that repositioned safety crimes as distinct from “real” crime. Chapter 6 examines the possibilities for assimilating safety crimes into existing structures of criminal law. Chapter 7 examines how to enforce empirically existing safety law and theoretical understanding of the modes of law enforcement. Chapter 8 examines the theoretical dimensions of punishment, sanctions, and prosecution against corporations. Chapter 9 summarizes and theorizes the nature of safety crime. List of tables and figures, list of abbreviations, forward, sources of information, references, and index