Globalisation & Crime (AQA A Level Sociology): Flashcards

Data doubles (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000) are digital profiles of individuals created by combining technologies, such as CCTV, credit card data and GPS tracking.

Beck argues that in a risk society, crime prevention focuses on predicting crime before it happens.

Nadelmann and Andreas show that global cooperation has tightened control over trafficking and smuggling routes.

False.

Most offences remain routine, everyday crimes within local communities, so globalisation may play a smaller role than claimed.

Global crime is difficult to research because it is secretive and complex, and reliable statistics are often unavailable.

McMafia is Glenny's (2008) term for how global organised crime networks operate like legitimate global businesses.

The global drug economy is structured by zones of production, distribution and consumption, like legitimate supply chains.

True.

After 1989-91, Russia's new oligarchs turned to mafias for protection and to move their wealth abroad.

Russia's oligarchs bought natural resources at artificially low Soviet prices and sold them abroad at vast profits.

Money laundering shows this overlap because gangs move illegal profits through legitimate banks, using 24-hour banking and offshore havens.

Containerisation is the use of interchangeable shipping containers, which criminal groups exploit to traffic drugs, weapons, people and counterfeit goods.

The Darknet is a hidden part of the internet offering encrypted and anonymous marketplaces for illegal goods and services.

False.

Legitimate corporations have too, e.g. ITT was implicated in efforts to overthrow President Allende in Chile (1973).

Organised networks exploit the internet because it offers high rewards with low risks.

Castells means a link between global capitalism and crime, e.g. criminals exploited the chaos of 1990s Russia as it shifted to a free market.

Castells describes money laundering as the 'matrix of global crime'.

Beck argues that these risks result from new technologies, such as the internet, developed by industrial capitalism.

True.

Beck sees risk management as the state's main role, e.g. stopping extremists from using the internet to recruit followers.

Green crime is crime against the environment, e.g. deforestation, pollution and toxic waste dumping.

Green crime is a global crime because environmental harm does not respect national borders, e.g. Chernobyl spread radioactive fallout across Europe.

False.

South argues that both corporations and governments engage in harmful behaviour that damages the environment.

Primary green crimes (South, 2008) are crimes that directly damage the environment by destroying or degrading natural resources, e.g. air pollution.

Secondary green crimes (South, 2008) are crimes that arise from breaking laws designed to protect the environment.

The oil-trading company Trafigura dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast in 2006, causing widespread health problems.

One example of state violence against environmental protesters is Bagua, Peru (2009), where police and military repression of indigenous protesters against oil and mining laws left 33 people dead, including 23 police officers.

White argues that green crime is hard to police because countries cannot agree on what counts as green crime and international law is weakly enforced.

False.

There is no such global agency, and national laws are often shaped by the interests of powerful transnational corporations.

Zemiology is an approach that focuses on harm rather than just legal definitions of crime.

White's approach is also called transgressive criminology, as it goes beyond traditional boundaries.

True.

Nation states and corporations taking this view see environmental harm as required to maintain materialist lifestyles.

White argues sociologists should take an ecocentric view, as environmental harm ultimately harms humanity itself.

Manufactured risks (Beck, 1992) are dangers created by human activity rather than natural causes, e.g. global warming.

Green criminology is accused of being subjective because what counts as harm depends on moral or political views.

Green crimes rarely appear in official statistics because they are seen as 'victimless' and are difficult to detect, so are under-reported.

Green and Ward (2004) define state crime as illegal or deviant activities committed by, or with the support of, state agencies such as governments, the police or the military.

Rummel calls the killing of people by governments 'democide', which includes genocide, mass killing and war crimes.

False.

All kinds of states, including democracies such as Britain, have been implicated in state crime.

The principle of national sovereignty makes it difficult for external bodies such as the United Nations to intervene in state crime.

McLaughlin identified political crimes, crimes by security and police forces, economic crimes and social and cultural crimes.

State-corporate crime is harm caused when states and corporations work together (Kramer and Michalowski, 2006).

False.

It is an example of state-facilitated corporate crime, as the US government failed to regulate safety properly.

Whyte described the US occupation of Iraq as 'neoliberal colonisation', as laws were changed to allow privatisation and oil revenues were seized.

Chambliss defines state crime as acts that are criminal under the law and committed by state officials in their official role.

Zemiology is the study of harms, whether or not they are legally defined as crime (Hillyard et al., 2004).

Schwendinger and Schwendinger argue that state crime should be defined as violations of human rights, e.g. torture and slavery.

Cohen criticises defining state crime by human rights because he argues that not all human rights abuses, e.g. economic exploitation, are self-evidently criminal, even if morally objectionable.

Kelman and Hamilton identify authorisation, dehumanisation and routinisation as the factors that produce crimes of obedience.

False.

Browning found little psychological difference, suggesting Adorno et al.'s authoritarian personality alone cannot explain atrocities.

Bauman (1989) argued that the Holocaust was a product of modernity, not a breakdown of civilisation.

The three stages of Cohen's spiral of denial are literal denial, interpretive denial and implicatory denial.

The Rwandan genocide challenges Bauman's explanation because it was largely carried out face to face by militias and civilians, rather than through a detached bureaucracy.