An empirical and theoretical analysis of the investigation and punishment processes of corporate offending in the UK, 2008-2016

Abstract

Existing studies on workplace corporate offending are limited to major issues such as punishment and definition rather than workplace deaths resulting from corporate violence. Corporate and safety crimes have been invisible in the criminal justice system and are missing from the criminology literature. This PhD thesis will help to reify corporate and safety crimes and contribute to the literature by applying a mixed methodology and several qualitative methods (documentary analysis, case studies, vignettes and supportive semi-structured interviews) and statistical analysis as a quantitative method. The thesis aims to answer three research questions: 1) How have UK government policy and legislation against corporate crime been implemented in practice since 2008? 2)Why can some corporate violence that resulted in deaths be seen as safety crime while others cannot? 3)What are the factors and roles of agencies that influence the prosecution process and the final decision? Statistical analysis was used to make an original contribution to the literature by examining the investigation and punishment processes of 759 work-related deaths (WRDs) and categorising them into five types (covering nine years: 2008-2016) to help answer the research questions. Approximately 46 per cent of all cases were punished under health-and-safety laws and regulations between these dates while 31.4 per cent of cases were not prosecuted or not punished. The CPS and court preferred to bring a charge of gross negligence manslaughter in only 13 cases and a charge of corporate manslaughter in around 3 per cent of all cases. 16 per cent of cases resulted in accidental death due to a variety of factors including the policing of corporate crime. Two case studies and 14 crime vignettes were employed to analyse the characteristics of these five investigation results. Criminal justice systems have taken a lenient regulatory approach, which can be seen in accidental death verdicts, coroner’s reports, the low conviction rate and low fines to act as a deterrent. Three important approaches within the prosecution and punishment processes are effectively part of the problematic picture of corporate crime, namely obtaining satisfactory evidence, the agencies’ approach and role (such as deciding public interest in a case and prioritising deaths in particular industry sectors) and the seriousness of negligence. This analysis provides more precise knowledge than previously available about the implementation of justice in the UK from 2008 to 2016. Notably, it reifies safety crime within the criminal justice system and in the scholarly literature, determining the reasons and factors behind non-convicted and convicted cases by analysing empirical data gained through published and unpublished documents and supporting them with interviews, which are currently yet to be done in this way. This research identified the characteristics of each type of investigation and punishment process and helped to show how agencies’ role and policy, the structure of the law, the roles of third party actors and other factors came to define a case as a crime (safety crime) or an accident (not crime).

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Identifiers

ORCID for Cem Ozdemir: orcid.org/0000-0003-0515-0529

ORCID for Jenny Fleming: orcid.org/0000-0002-7913-3345

ORCID for Roderick Rhodes: orcid.org/0000-0002-1886-2392

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