members of the public who supposedly operate within the realm of legal or legitimate business. Members of the police force, business owners, and all ranks of the legal profession are often on the payrolls of and actually constitute organized crime . In the Seattle study, this crime network was established in part to serve as a source of funds for politicians at all levels. Unorganized crime refers to crime committed by individuals or small groups of individuals against other individuals, for example, rape, robbery, assault, theft, burglary and murder. Political crimes includes activities taken by political organizations as a way of dramatizing their message or sabotaging the efforts of the opposition. Militant civil rights and anti-war activities often led to the bombings of army research centers and obstructing racist operations by deliberating violating "white" policy. Today, anti-nuclear activists may damage the fuel rods at a nuclear power plant. In political crime, then, usually there is not a profit motive involved.
Especially now that the recession is giving way to increasing unemployment every day, further stratifying society into the haves and the have-nots, street crime is rising steadily. Rape statistics, for example, now indicate that one out of every 13 women in the United States will be raped. However, "by almost every estimate, crime in the suites (i.e. corporate crime) exacts an even heavier toll on the nation's economy" (Pauly, 1979, p. 114). According to Benjamin Civiletti, U.S. Attorney General, corporate crime accounts for losses that place in the billions. A study conducted by Marshall B. Clinard, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin, revealed that of 582 U.S. corporations over 60 percent had been accused of committing an average of five illegal activities.
The social costs of corporate crime presented by Mother Jones in a series of in-depth articles is staggering. "Dumping," or ex...