Organised Crime & Crime Prevention - what works? - Scandinavian ...

NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
aswer is that white collar criminals adopt a vocabulary of motives: excuses, justifications,
disclaimers and denials.24
Foucault´s analysis on the establishment of a useful group called delinquents is pertinent here
as well. He distuingishes illegalities and delinquency, where he claims the strategic
opposition to exist (although the juridicial opposition is between legalities and illegalities).
The fact remains that many types of harmful business behaviour have succeeded in avoiding
being subject to any criminal sanctions at all.25 According to Foucault, delinquents will
remain at the borderland of society, they are forced to be satisfied with weak conditions of
life, becuse they are cut off from the population that could help them; they are categorized
inevitably as a part of localized criminality, which isn´t atrractive; which is politically not
dangerous and economically harmless.26
One the other hand one must also ask, is this agressive way of reacting to (white collar) crime
desirable? Aren´t the mechanisms of the the criminal justice systems as a whole legitimated
through this “war against white collar criminals“. Henry and Milovanovic have suggested that
conventional crime control efforts fuel the engine of crime. Control interventions take
criminal activity to new levels on investment and self enclosed innovation. Public horror and
outrage call for more investment in control measures that further feed the cyckle. They claim
that crime is autopoetic in that it is self-sustaining through its absorption of others reactions to
it.27
The suitability of the criminal justice system itself in its task has surely been questioned
among criminologists (abolitionism, peacemaking criminology), but this has been done
mostly in relation to street crime. In fact, with respect to white collar crime, the controllers
and even the critical criminologists have stood at the same side! The Finnish criminal justice
system is now embracing also other than the marginalized: in its net are caught also the elite´s
representatives who have expressed that the criminal justice system is unfair. Will this lead
into that new mechanisms outside the criminal justice system are demanded and developed? If
so, will those alternative mechanisms be implemented only in the illegalities of the elite?
Why is it useful too look at the control system of white collar crime and reactions against it?
White collar crime has questioned the traditional concept of crime. It reminds us constantly of
the artificiality of all definions of crime28, and maybe even makes us question the
onthological reality of crime on the whole.29 The control mechanisms of white collar crime
are different then those of ordinary crime, and so are the reactions against control. The control
of these offences is often said of being hampered of competing values and social costs which
do not arise in repressing ordinary crime.30
Research on white collar crime should not, however, lead to reaffirm the existing realities of
the criminal justice system. What Henry and Milovanovic suggest in their proposal for a
Constitutive Criminology is the development of alternative replacement discourses, which are
directed toward the dual process of deconstructing prevailing structures of meanings and
24 Friedrics 1996, (among others), 230.
25 Nelken in Maguire et al: Oxford Handbook of Criminology (1994), p. 366.
26 Foucault: Dicipline and Punish, (1980), p. 315.
27 See Henry and Milovanovic: Constitutive Criminology,(1996), pp. 214-241.
28 See Nelken (1994), p. 366.
29 This is what the aboilitionists claim: there is no onthological reality of crime.
30 See Nelken (1994), p. 360.
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