The Language of Crime and Deviance

Corporate crime

Corporate crime – or, more generally, the deviant activities of respectable institutions, corporations and individuals – has been relatively neglected in the study of crime and deviance, although it is a widespread problem in all contemporary societies; so much so that it can be thought of as a normal part of how our societies in general, and capitalism in particular, operate (Minkes and Minkes, 2010). To some extent, corporations are set up through teams of accountants, lawyers and professional enablers precisely to maximize profits through ‘creative law avoidance’ (Minkes and Minkes: 49). And even when such crimes are challenged, they may come to be defined as ‘illegal’ but not ‘criminal’ (Geis, 1972). While corporate crime is far more costly for society than other kinds of crime, it is simply not seen as being the same kind of burden on us as conventional crime.

This neglect of corporate crime has been generally reflected in the media. Although the news media have always devoted at least some space to the crimes of the rich and powerful, and popular awareness of corporate crime has certainly increased over the years through the reporting of high-profile cases, there is still far less information about this type of crime than there is about ‘common’ or ‘street’ crime. Why this should be the case is not too difficult to see. A great deal of corporate crime is made invisible by the careful planning and execution of those involved in it, the relative lack of law-enforcement and prosecution, and the lenient legal and social sanctions imposed on those who stand accused of it. Governments will often create legislation in the context of what a particular sector finds acceptable (Minkes and Minkes, 2010). And unlike other kinds of crime dealt with in this book, corporate crime will not be so easily provided to journalists by the usual definers of crime, the police.

In Britain in the twenty-first century, there have been a number of high profile public cases which could, in other contexts, be seen as criminal acts. Banks were responsible for reckless behaviour leading to billions of pounds of demands on taxpayers, and privatized companies were running health services with reduced staffing and services in order to hike up profits, leading to run-down services and festering buildings riddled with hospital viruses. We find that pubic employees are told to mislead benefits claimants to cut down on the number of unemployed. We are told our pensions may no longer exist, as the government has tapped into these in order to lower tax rates. Names and organizations may arise in the news media, but we certainly find no mention of ‘crime’ or sentencing. What appear to be injustices and unfairness in our society may have little connection to what comes to be called ‘crime’.

This (ideological) lack of coverage in the both the print and broadcast media has been noted by many working in criminology and media studies. According to Box (1983: 31), the market value of public preference for immediacy over complexity is the driving force here. As he puts it, ‘The public understands more easily what it means for an old lady to have £5 snatched from her purse than to grasp the financial significance of corporate crime’. We are continually exposed to a portrayal of crime (some of which is fictional) with an emphasis on sensational, especially violent, cases, which is considered essentially a lower-class phenomenon. This sensationalist bias serves to divert attention from structural and political sources of crime.

In this chapter, we first review the academic literature that defines corporate crime and which attempts to account for the reasons why it resists being defined as ‘crime’. We then apply this to a case study of the Paddington rail crash which resulted in a large number of deaths and gruesome injuries, and was caused by companies systematically cutting costs to increase profits.

Defining corporate crime

Knowledge and understanding of corporate crime was greatly influenced by American criminologist Edwin Sutherland (1940, 1949), who coined the term ‘white-collar crime’ and defined such a crime as one ‘committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation’ (Sutherland, 1949: 9). Sutherland also included crimes committed by corporations and other legal entities within his definition, which he regarded as widespread and endemic.

Sutherland’s study of white-collar crime was prompted by the view that criminology had incorrectly focused on the social and economic determinants of crime, such as family background and level of wealth. According to Sutherland, crime is committed at all levels of society and often by persons operating through large and powerful organizations. White-collar crime, Sutherland concluded, has a greatly underestimated impact upon our society.

Although it was Sutherland who first popularized the term ‘white-collar crime, recognition of this type of crime goes back much further in history. As Friedrichs (2004: 2) notes, there has been a long tradition in Europe and America that has recognized the crimes of the powerful and privileged. In the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels (1848) argued that the powerful and privileged commit crimes as a direct consequence of the capitalist economic system, a view that was echoed at the beginning of the twentieth century by Dutch criminologist Bonger (1905), who regarded capitalism as criminogenic.

While Europe has a long history of radical and critical social theory, the United States has a much richer tradition of ‘explicit treatment’ of corporate crime (Slapper and Tombs, 1999: 2–3). For example, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, Norwegian-American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1899) likened captains of industry to ‘street’ criminals. They were, he said, ‘like the ideal delinquent in [their] unscrupulous conversion of goods and persons to [their] own ends’, and displayed a ‘callous disregard of the feelings and wishes of others, and of the remoter effects of [their] actions’ (1899: 237–8). In the early twentieth century, popular concern about corporate crime in America was expressed in the ‘populist movement’ and subsequently the ‘muckraking’ tradition, with its investigative journalists who exposed some of the wrongdoings of the emergent capitalist industrial order. One movement associated with muckraking, ‘progressivism’, sought to limit the excesses of individual capitalists, while being in favour of capitalism in principle. It was within this progressivist climate that American sociologist E. A. Ross (1907) identified the ‘criminaloid’, the businessman who committed exploitative, if not necessarily illegal, acts out of an uninhibited desire to maximize profit. Ross, who had a direct influence on Sutherland, held these criminaloids directly responsible for the deaths of workers and consumers and regarded them as a threat to a just capitalist society, which he supported. And in 1935, Albert Morris drew up a list of the ‘criminals of the upperworld’, in which he included bankers (!), stockbrokers, manufacturers, politicians, contractors and law enforcement officials as examples of the type.

Sutherland’s definition of white-collar crime is now somewhat dated, although the term continues to be widely used, as it is convenient for distinguishing this type of crime from ‘street’ crime. Since the mid-1970s, the term ‘corporate crime’ has become widely used, which is seen as both a major form of white-collar crime and a specific form of organizational crime (Kramer, 1984; Friedrichs, 2001). There is no one accepted definition for corporate crime, but perhaps the one offered by Schrager and Short (1977), which was later elaborated on by Box (1983), is a useful starting point. Schrager and Short (1977: 409) define corporate crime as

illegal acts of omission or commission of an individual or a group of individuals in a legitimate formal organization in accordance with the operative goals of the organization which have a serious physical or economic impact on employees, consumers or the general public.

That corporate crime should include acts of omission as well as commission is significant. This definition also stresses that ‘the pursuit of organizational goals is deeply implicated in the cause(s) of corporate crime’ (Box, 1983: 21) and that officials are socialized into an organizational ‘way of life’. Corporate crime can therefore be caused by an organization’s structure and its culture. Most corporate crimes, argues Braithwaite (1984: 2) ‘cannot be explained by the perverse personalities of their perpetrators’. This claim calls into question the tendency in individualistic cultures in general, and in crime reporting in particular, to locate the source of ‘evil’ acts in ‘evil’ people. This does not mean that individuals within corporations should be not be held accountable for their actions, but that corporations are ‘sites of complex relationships, invested with power and authority’, between individuals and wider groups within the corporation (Slapper and Tombs, 1999: 17). This is precisely what is missing from a lot of news coverage on corporate crime. Like ‘street’ crime, corporate crime is often reduced to an individual-level analysis of good versus evil that obscures the organizational nature of corporate crime (Vaughan, 2001).

Corporate crime and the media

Many working in criminology and media studies have commented on the (ideological) lack of coverage on corporate crime in both the print and broadcast media (e.g. Cohen and Young, 1973; Chibnall, 1977; Box, 1983; Slapper and Tombs, 1999; White 2008 ; Jewkes, 2011). Cavender et al. (2010) distinguish between two traditions of media studies of corporate crime. One view stresses a general lack of interest in corporate crime because it lacks ‘the brimstone smell’ (Evans and Lundman, 1983: 529) and moral blameworthiness (Simpson, 2002: 49) that characterizes street crimes. Corporate crimes are too complicated to make for a good story and therefore are not conventionally newsworthy (Lynch et al., 2000). The second tradition suggests that, nowadays, the public is interested in corporate crime and that the media do cover the phenomenon. However, it is the nature of the coverage that is the problem. When the media cover corporate crime, they employ the same crime news frame as for ‘street’ crime, a frame that oversimplifies the phenomenon (Cavender and Mulcahy, 1998). By and large, this tendency of the mainstream media to report on corporate crime as a matter of individual pathology has hampered the investigation and condemnation of large corporations and governments for their criminal acts. Importantly, one of the ways the corporate origins and nature of corporate crimes are obscured is through the language used in the media and by corporations themselves. A number of criminologists (e.g. Tombs and Whyte, 2007; Walters, 2010) state the importance of labelling the wrongdoings of corporations as ‘crime’. But there is still a preference in media cycles to report on corporate crime in terms of ‘abuses of power’ and ‘scandals’, not least because that makes them more newsworthy (Levi, 1987: 10). Terms such as ‘scandal’ and ‘abuse’ carry implications of immorality rather than criminal offence and makes these crimes look novel and rare, while in fact they are widespread and routine (Slapper and Tombs, 1999).

Wells, too, has commented on the relative lack of labelling available for criminal acts committed by corporations, stating that, for example, the term ‘fraud’ is an ‘anaesthetizing generic term for a number of offences including theft’ and that ‘if we do not call a white-collar thief a thief then we should not be surprised that it sounds a little odd to talk of a corporation stealing (or wounding or killing)’ (1993: 10).

Another term, ‘accident’, commonly used for occupational health and safety and environmental crimes, connotes ‘the unforeseeable, unknowable and unpreventable’ and evokes ‘discrete, isolated and random events’ (Slapper and Tombs, 1999: 95). There is no doubt that the use of some of these terms is the result of corporate manipulation. This is not surprising, given the privileged access to and ownership of all mass media by large corporations who in this way control and manage information. The choice of this kind of language suits not only corporations but also the commercial media, which generally report on crime in a manner that evokes notions of spectacle (Jewkes, 2011). Labelling corporate crimes as ‘scandals’ makes them immediately more newsworthy and spectacular. According to radical crime and media theorists, apart from investigative journalism, media institutions either downplay or misrepresent the crimes of powerful corporations. As a result, news reporting remains ‘coupled to state definitions of crime and criminal law’ (Jewkes, 2011: 24).

Techniques of neutralization

In Sin and Society, E. A. Ross (1907) states that ‘criminaloids move in an atmosphere of friendly approval [. . .] and this can still smart any conscience with the balm of good fellowship and adulation’ (quoted in Box, 1983: 54). Box (1983: 55), following Mills, argues that corporate officials are able to translate motives into actual criminal behaviour because they act in a ‘subculture of structural immoralities’ (Mills, 1956: 138). This notion is, according to Box, similar to what Matza (1964: 33–68) described as the ‘subculture of delinquency’. Matza applied this concept to conventional (adolescent) criminals, but both concepts consist of norms and beliefs which act as extenuating conditions and make crime permissible. Box concludes that

these subcultures, respectively enable corporate officials and lower-class adolescent males to commit crimes without too many pangs of conscience; through their sanitizing prism, each subculture softens criminal acts so that they assume the appearance of ‘not really’ being against the law, or it transforms them into acts required by a morality higher than that enshrined in a parochial criminal law. (Box, 1983: 55)

There is much evidence of this phenomenon. To quote just one example, Cressey (1953) found that embezzlers interpreted their criminal conduct merely as ‘borrowing’ the money over which they had control. Although people know that their behaviour is wrong, they manage to offset it in their minds through what Sykes and Matza (1957) have termed ‘techniques of neutralization’, that is, verbal accounts through which deviants mitigate and justify their criminal conduct. Sykes and Matza developed these in relation to young offenders, but they have been applied to ‘white-collar’ corporate officials (e.g. Box, 1983; Slapper and Tombs, 1999), because, just like ordinary criminals, they deny responsibility. They do so, for example, by claiming that they acted under orders or by pleading ignorance. Laws regulating corporate behaviour tend to be vague and can be interpreted differently by those violating them. Claiming that negligent behaviour (as seen with BP in the gulf of Mexico) was an ‘accident’ is another convenient way of abrogating responsibility.

A second common technique of neutralization for corporate officials is to deny the victim. Unlike with a lot of ordinary crime, in which real people are the victims, many corporate crimes, because they affect distant countries, can be interpreted as ‘victim-less’ (e.g. exporting toxic waste).

A third technique for corporate officials is to condemn the condemners by denying the legitimacy of the law regulating their behaviour as well as the competence of those enforcing the law, that is, the government.

Fourth, corporate officials may appeal to higher loyalties by claiming loyalty to the corporation as a superior moral imperative. By using some or all of these four neutralization techniques, which are embedded in the ‘structural immorality’ of corporations, Box (1983) says, executives are able to violate the law without guilt and without damaging their respectable non-deviant self-image. We can see one neutralization technique in operation in the case we will go on to discuss now.

The Paddington rail crash

In this section, we consider one case study that allows us to scrutinize the observations made about corporate crime above in the context of the news coverage of one event. We look at the way that blame is allocated to a private corporation and at the accusations made against them for their actions, which in this case, clearly led to public death and injury. What we show is that the death and injury of large numbers of people in this particular case are reported, in the first place, through non-crime news frames. Media scholars have shown how events are only recognized as newsworthy by journalists when they tick a number of news values criteria (see Chapter 1), or when they fit a number of news frames (Bennett, 2005). The Paddington rail crash is covered, in the first place, as a ‘disaster’ rather than as a crime. And disaster reporting has specific stages which dominate other concerns. We find that the issue of criminality and punishment is raised, but this is partly lost in the discourses being used. As we shall see, one key problem is the absence of the official definers of crime (i.e. the police) and the lack of a terminology to describe the Paddington rail ‘disaster’ as a crime.

On 5 October 1999, two trains collided in Paddington, London. Thirty-one people were killed and 400 injured in the crash, many with horrific burns, as one carriage was engulfed by burning fuel. In the final hearing outcome, two rail corporations were fined several million pounds each. There were a number of key criticisms of the companies.

In the first place, a driver with only three week’s experience and poor training had passed a badly designed and concealed signal which was known by the operators to be problematic. At the hearing, there was much criticism of the training given to drivers following privatization of the railways in 1994. Many experienced workers had been made redundant in order to cut costs. Formerly, drivers had been recruited from existing staff who had a great deal of experience and who would ride with an experienced driver for one year before driving alone.

In the second place, to avoid costs, the companies had grossly neglected safety and in many cases appropriate measures had not been taken to resolve known and well-reported problems. At the hearing, this decision had been shrouded in claims of being concerned with not passing the costs onto the travelling public. Railway workers had been told to carry on and meet deadlines and targets and to ignore problems and safety issues.

Additionally in this case, some blame lay with the government, who had abandoned an early warning system installation programme in the early 1990s in the lead-up to privatization. The estimated cost of £3 billion was thought to exceed ‘normal safety investment criteria as measured by cost per equivalent fatality avoided’ and the government had been concerned about the excessive price of the stock should the money be invested.

In summary, safety standards were not implemented by the government because the railways were soon to be privatized. Upon privatization, there were changes in staffing, recruitment and training in order to save costs. There was also a lack of regard for warnings regarding safety issues, again with a view to costs. The privatization of the railways in Britain has been connected with an emphasis on short-term profitability and gross neglect of investment in safety and infrastructure (Jack, 2001).

From the point of view of crime, we could argue that the companies running the railways failed to maintain equipment despite warnings and were guilty of reducing staff training necessary for the levels of experience required. We could also argue that the government, too, made decisions that contributed to the situation by not providing an adequate warning system, and also that they failed to correctly monitor the rail companies. In the face of previous accidents involving deaths, and clear knowledge of signalling problems and the inadequacy of warning systems, there was awareness at some level that trains were operating in a way that could lead to further deaths.

Of interest here is the way the news media reported the event and how responsibility was attributed and what penalties were called for. We look at the way the question of responsibility and blame was raised as the events took place and as they were later discussed as new information became available to journalists.

To understand the reporting of this story, it is important that we view it as part of the typical, ritualized way that the news media represent disasters: through a sequence of bearing witness to the horror, the moral community, and dissent and disagreement.

First of all, the news media reported the drama of the event itself. Coverage focused on images of shock, suffering and disruption. For example, consider the following headline:

PADDINGTON RAIL DISASTER: PEOPLE WERE JUMPING OUT ON FIRE. I STEPPED OVER A DEAD WOMAN . . . AND WEPT BY THE TRACK (Daily Mirror, 6 October 1999)

This was typical of the first response of the news media. These stories contained graphic descriptions of what happened in the collision and gave firsthand accounts of the survivors telling what they had experienced during the crash and how they had been trapped, seen burning bodies and heard screams. These are the typical first responses of human drama found in large-scale disasters such as the events of 11 September 2001 in New York and 7 July 2005 in London. Pantii and Wahl-Jorgensen (2007: 13) speak of the way that this stage of media reporting is characterized by ‘bearing witness and giving testimony to the carnage’. The use of the ‘ordinary’ person guarantees authentic details of misfortune.

This first wave of stories was followed by a second wave which celebrated the heroes of the day. Media scholars have noted how the initial phase of disaster reporting is followed by a stage which emphasizes bonds of community and solidarity (Turner, 1982). So here we celebrate heroic acts of survivors and rescuers. We find this characterized in the following headline from the Daily Mirror two days after the event:

DISASTER AT PADDINGTON: HEROES OF HORROR; HOW WE HELPED RAIL CRASH VICTIMS: AMBULANCEMAN (8 October 1999)

This story recounts the experiences of ambulance workers, the sights they saw and how they worked extra shifts. Other newspapers ran stories related to other brave individuals. At this stage, we will also find reflection on individual case studies, such as from this Daily Mail headline:

Bright futures snatched away amid tearing metal;

TRAGIC DOSSIER OF THE FIRST IDENTIFIED VICTIMS DISASTER AT PADDINGTON (8 October 1999)

In other disasters, this is the stage in which we are shown the mother and child survivor of an earthquake or some other catastrophe as they are found in the rubble.

Here we also find other stories which point to moral community, such as the reactions of family members, as can be seen in the following story from the Daily Mail (8 October 1999):

PILGRIMAGE OF SORROW

[. . .]

They had seen pictures of the blackened wreckage on television and in newspapers. But now the relatives of the Paddington rail disaster victims faced the scene itself. In their desperate grief they could only cling together for comfort.

It is typical at this stage in the coverage to see more staged images of survivors and families uniting in sympathy and grief, as opposed to the earlier ones of victims and destruction. We do find the use of the word ‘victims’ but no reference to human or criminal agency. People are simply victims of a disaster. Later there will be further ritualization through official ceremonies. Newspapers will call on the nation to pray and remember together (Cottle, 2009: 56). It is at this point that politicians are required to comment on their own personal grief and shock. The following headlines from the Daily Mail are typical of this:

A candle for the daddies who will not be coming home (Daily Mail, 8 October 1999)

A tragedy making us one family (Daily Mail, 9 October 1999)

At the next stage in the ritual of disaster reporting, we read about dissent and disagreement. It is at this stage that we find press criticism of authorities or attempts to point to those responsible. Earlier in the coverage, when ‘what happened’ was being rapidly thrown together, it appeared to be the fault of the driver, as can be seen in the following headline:

Did driver jump a red light? INFERNO ON THE 8.06 IN A GRIM ECHO OF SOUTHALL, HOW HUMAN ERROR may be to blame (Daily Mail, 6 October 1999)

The story reported on evidence that a light had been jumped and that ‘experts’ had commented that it was unlikely to be a mechanical failure. The story does level some blame, but it is unspecific, in the form of:

If, as seems likely, the Ladbroke Grove tragedy was caused by an overshoot, it will fuel anger against both the Government and the previous Tory administration.

It is at this point, as media scholars have observed, that journalists may be able to raise actual concrete issues for concern, such as social inequality and corporate power, and the society we want to live in (Dayan and Katz, 1992). We find the following in the Daily Express (7 October 1999) only a few days after the crash:

CRASH WAITING TO HAPPEN

At this stage, the journalist presents the incident as part of broader issues and trends, rather than dealing with the exact details of the current crash:

BRITAIN’S railways have seen an alarming increase in the number of dangerous incidents caused by trains running through red lights. Last year more than 50 drivers passed red lights, failing to stop within the safety distance, an increase above 25 per cent.

The rise paints a picture of an accident waiting to happen and was a cause for concern among safety professionals before the Paddington disaster.

Last month the Rail Inspectorate published the results of a year-long study into trains overshooting warning lights. There were a total of 643 incidents over the last year, but most involved trains which stopped 183 metres after passing the light – the recognized safety distance.

The inspectorate noted that the real concern was the huge increase in dangerous incidents. It warned that more lives would be lost in accidents if the industry failed to make improvements.

Eighty per cent of the cases were found to be driver error – many simply had not seen the signal

[. . .]

Methods for assessing the competence of drivers are also questioned. A driver who passed a signal at Upminster in March 1997 was found to have had ‘an unsuitable temperament for driving suburban type trains’.

[. . .]

The report says companies need to devote more time and effort to ensure such incidents do not happen. It concludes that over-runs of red lights ‘probably give rise to the highest safety risk facing the rail industry and therefore demands an appropriate level of resource and commitment’.

Of course, actual information about the activities of the rail companies involved was not available until the Cullen report was released in 2001. Here the journalist has identified and used a report which was made public, more broadly dealing with railway standards.

What is interesting here is that no crime as such is identified, and this is contextualized as part of a pattern which points to ‘an accident waiting to happen’ and in which companies ‘need to devote more time and effort’ to avoid further ‘incidents’. There is no warning of responsibility and consequences. We do not find the directive ‘company bosses found guilty of killing will face a minimum of five years imprisonment or a fine of five million pounds’. This text also merges issues of driver error with company responsibility for improvements.

In such cases, there are none of the usual definers of crime. The journalist is dependent on the definitions offered by the report. The police are not the first source from whom we hear about this event, and they are not mentioned in the report. Here, the sources are ‘safety professionals’ and the ‘Rail Inspectorate’. Therefore, we find no mention of this as a crime. As Levi (1987) points out, the news media rather point to ‘scandals’ and will use words such as ‘accident’ instead of ‘killing’. In fact, later investigation of the Paddington crash revealed the way the companies had ruthlessly taken apart the system, making redundancies, cutting costs to increase profits, ditching established, time-consuming and expensive safety procedures and dramatically reducing training.

In the following excerpt from a Daily Mail article, we see an example in which journalists did start to generate more background information about the dire state of the railways. But there still is no mention of legal or moral responsibility. In the Daily Mail (9 November 1999) we find,

TERROR OF RAILMAN WHO SAW IT COMING

Six lights all on red, but still the train failed to stop.

The article is drawn from an interim report on the events produced by the Health and Safety Executive. It begins with the account of a railway worker who tried to change the signal when he saw the train passing but was too late. It then moves on to the list of problems with the rail system in terms of signalling and warning technology. We can look at the language used to describe causes and agents.

First we find that crash investigators said that

possible driver error was ‘only one factor’ and an overall systems failure played a major part.

Here the ‘systems failure’ is personified as the agent, playing a part alongside the driver error. Neither the negligence nor the greed of the companies, nor the companies themselves, are positioned as agents. Likewise, we find the government’s direct level of responsibility shifted through the use of the passive verb in the following sentence:

The report, by Chief Inspector of Railways Vic Coleman, said the accident would have been prevented if the Government’s planned Train Protection Warning System had already been installed.

In the next section from the same article we do, however, find direct mention of the possibilities of criminal charges; the report said,

The full investigation will focus on the ‘root causes’, immediate remedial action and whether enforcement [. . .] including prosecution, is justified. There could be manslaughter charges if there is evidence of gross neglect.

There is no list of who might be responsible. Instead, we find a number of nouns (‘root causes’, ‘evidence’) and nominalizations (‘investigation’, ‘enforcement’, ‘action’, ‘prosecution’) which all elide agency. But what we do find, in a paragraph further down in the article, is an oblique pointer as to where neglect might lie, described without directly connecting this to the events:

Thames Trains managing director Keith Ludeman said his company was ‘deeply disturbed’ by the accident and pledged to do all it could to improve safety. But it emerged yesterday that Thames has cut its driver training by almost half this year, from 18–20 weeks to ten.

Five days after the event, a stronger language of blame begins to emerge. However, this is phrased in language that points to moral rather than legal guilt. In the Mail on Sunday (10 October 1999) we find the following:

Sacrifices on the altar of rail profit

Internal Railtrack documents that we have seen show beyond doubt that, at the highest level, vital considerations of passenger safety were given a lower priority than cost and share prices.

Anyone who doubts that those who died were sacrificed on the altar of profitability should simply read our report on the Rail-track board’s decision in 1995 not to install the Automatic Train Protection system. It is clear that the seeds of last Tuesday’s disaster were sown then.

The fateful board meeting reveals an unedifying picture of cynical and short-sighted calculation.

No one is suggesting that board members actually expected that there would be any tragic reckoning for their rejection of the new system on grounds of cost. But what they hoped and expected is that even without ATP – which would have cost GBP 750 million at that time – there would be little likelihood of a serious crash.

[. . .]

For more than four years their gamble paid off. On October 5, outside Paddington, it came disastrously unstuck.

It is clear, moreover, that, consciously or not, the calculation was heavily influenced by the potential impact of GBP 750 million-worth of expenditure on the value of a company that was about to be privatised.

This is something that really puts the directors in the dock – morally, if not legally (though solicitors for the bereaved families might have a different view of that). For, with their substantial share holdings, they had a direct stake in ensuring that the value of the privatized company was as high as possible.

[. . .]

And they should have thought of it when they were accepting that, in a fragmented railway system, Railtrack would be able to resist paying more than it thought costs justified. In short, the directors felt confident that their decision would escape public scrutiny and criticism.

In the light of all this, the radical reassessment of Railtrack’s fitness to monitor and safeguard safety standards, announced yesterday by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, is entirely justified. And long overdue.

For, quite simply, our disclosures show that Railtrack cannot be trusted with the safety of the millions who must rely upon it every day of the week.

At the start of the article, we find that the link between the actions of the company and the deaths and injuries of passengers is described with a metaphor and a passive construction, ‘were sacrificed on the altar of profitability’, which removes direct agency.

This could, in the case of an accepted crime, read something more like ‘Those who were killed and burned by Railtrack through their decision not to install the system’. The motives of the company are described neither in terms of ‘monsterization’ nor ‘pure evil’ but as an ‘unedifying picture of cynical and short-sighted calculation’.

We are then told that

No one is suggesting that board members actually expected that there would be any tragic reckoning for their rejection of the new system on grounds of cost.

Here, actual responsibility is again mitigated. We are told that ‘no one is suggesting’ that they thought there would be a crash. On the one hand, this is a presupposition that assumes the possibility that someone might make this suggestion. On the other hand, it allows the writer to provide a sense of what everyone thinks. And in the next line, this is described as a ‘gamble’ which had paid off for over four years. In this sense, the use of the world ‘gamble’ loosens the connection to intentionality. In business terms, we might argue that the managers took a legitimate course of action making permissible and reasonable decisions based on profit orientation, which is the job of the managers of corporations.

We are then told about the actual legal status of their actions:

It is hinted that there may be room for legal responsibility, but it is clearly stated here that this is a moral rather than a legal issue. We could argue that companies should be governed by legal sanctions when operating public services for which safety is of such great issue. We could also argue that there should be clear legal terms for such crimes.

The text suggests solutions in terms of closer monitoring of the rail companies along with an assessment of Railtrack’s ability to be trusted. But this is a language of ‘assessment’ and ‘trust’ and not ‘guilt’ and ‘retribution’.

What was lacking at this point in the unfolding of events was an individual who could be used to personalize the events. As Braithwaite (1984) reminds us, one reason corporate crime is too complex for news reporting is that it is often hard to explain the crime through the perverse character of one single evil-doer. As we have seen so far in this analysis, there appear to be a number of organizations involved. There are two rail companies involved, and also the negligence of the government, who were mindful of the value of the company prior to privatization.

What was lacking for the press was personalization of the crime. This was later provided through the head of Railtrack, Gerald Corbett. He became the face that personified the companies who had the moral, if not legal, guilt. The British news media will often convert such stories into cases of corporate ‘fat cats’, although Vaughan (2001) points out that this focus on individuals who went too far can serve to obscure the nature of corporate crime and the fact that this is often part of the way the system is allowed to operate. We find an example of how Railtrack chief Corbett was dealt with in the following story from the Daily Mirror (12 November 1999). Here Corbett speaks about resignation should his company be found at fault:

VOICE OF THE MIRROR: RAIL BOSS CAN’T SHIFT THE BLAME

RAILTRACK chief Gerald Corbett thought it would be good for him to come out fighting yesterday.

But his public defence of the company’s involvement in the Paddington disaster was so painfully inept that he would have been wiser to stay silent.

Mr Corbett promised he would ‘resign immediately’ if anything was found to be wrong with the fateful Signal 109. It was, he insisted, in ‘perfect working order’ on the day of the crash.

But when pressed, he indicated that the signal would almost certainly now be changed in the light of what had happened.

Changed? Why on earth would anyone want to change a perfect signal?

They will tell him that Railtrack’s relentless drive for profit at the expense of fixing potentially fatal signal sites and installing vital safety equipment is offensive. Very offensive.

What we see is that Corbett himself became the face of the rail company, although he was certainly never questioned in terms of his character. It is normal, as we have seen in other chapters, for criminals to be assessed as much on the basis of their criminal personality as on the crimes they have committed. In the case of the paedophile, Glen Tranter, in Chapter 6, it appeared that his character was more at issue than what he had actually done, which was backgrounded in the story. In this story, Corbett is represented as saying that he will resign should anything be ‘found wrong with the fateful signal’. So here ‘resignation’ is presented as a possible punishment and may be one way that corporations can show they are accepting responsibility, diverting attention away from criminal responsibility. And here the continued emphasis on the signal by Corbett could be seen as keeping attention away from broader issues of neglect and criminality. The signal here is described by Corbett as ‘fateful’ rather than the consequence of downgrading safety through deliberate profit-motivated decisions. We therefore can see the ‘denial of responsibility’ technique at work, an important part of the neutralization process on behalf of companies (Box, 1983).

In the Mirror (25 November 1999), Corbett is criticized for shifting blame for the crash to the train driver, who died in the crash:

Police rap Railtrack for crash ‘blame’

Police may recommend that Railtrack bosses be charged with corporate manslaughter if there is evidence individuals in charge of public safety were criminally negligent.

In a Mirror interview days after the disaster we asked Railtrack boss Gerald Corbett if such charges would be appropriate.

He stormed out in a rage, saying: ‘I find that deeply offensive’.

Railtrack has tried to escape blame for the crash – which killed 30 people – by claiming a Thames train jumped a red light and stressing its own equipment was in order.

Here we do find the language of crime (‘corporate manslaughter’). This is the first time reporters have received material from the traditional definers of crime, that is the police. We also find the intentions of the police expressed through low commitment (‘may recommend’). The rest of the text discusses more details of the case, which are repetitions of earlier information about the signal and the driver, and ends with a comment from the transport secretary:

And Mr Prescott will warn companies could lose their licence to operate if they fail safety standards.

The criminal nature of the events is therefore discussed again in the context of non-criminal terms, such as losing licences. Nor do we find the kind of ‘monsterization’ of the ‘bosses’ that would characterize those suspected of other kinds of criminal acts. In such cases, unlike ordinary criminals, the heads of corporations will have legal resources at their disposal to deal with such kinds of treatment.

At this point, the news media, as is characteristic of disaster reporting, shift attention to attacking the companies and the government, sometimes using terms associated with crime, but for the most part not pinning down what they were actually responsible for nor how they should be punished. For journalists, there is clearly a sense that the public will be pleased by the idea of challenging corporations in this way. The problem is that this is never sustained in the fashion of other crime reporting. The Daily Mail (14 November 1999) wrote,

Train crash bosses could face charges

RAIL bosses could face criminal prosecutions and possible jail sentences over the Paddington crash, it emerged yesterday.

A senior police officer heading the disaster inquiry said his team would be examining whether there was evidence for manslaughter charges.

Superintendent Nick Bracken of the British Transport Police, who did not name any of the companies, said: ‘We are looking to see if there was individual or corporate criminal liability’.

Here we find terms such as ‘criminal prosecutions’, ‘jail sentences’, ‘manslaughter charges’ and ‘evidence’. However, the text does not explore which people might face charges nor what the punishment might be. And the jail sentences are only ‘possible’. It appears here that the journalist has taken the liberty of providing a sentence hedged in low modality (‘could face criminal prosecutions and possible jail sentences’) to provide his or her own interpretation of what might result should there be manslaughter charges. This is a significant step, as we begin to see some mention of the kinds of punishment usually associated with ordinary crime. But there is less confidence in the mode of writing. The journalist could have used stronger modality and written ‘bosses must go to jail’. But there appears to be evidence in the reporting of corporate-level crime that there is unease with sending such people to prison, which is associated more with the working classes. After all, in many ways, these are people whom our society values because they are successful white middle-class men. Minkes and Minkes (2010: 186) remind us that when lay people call someone a criminal, they are not simply saying that they have broken a law. ‘Criminal’ has broader meanings and conveys many more value judgements about a person, related to them being dangerous, ‘low-life’, immoral, a product of bad genes/bad upbringing, as coming from broken families and so on. Most importantly, ‘criminals are different’.

This news article then moved on to look at the details of signalling and mentioned some of the aims of the government for changes in regulations. Here, importantly, the reporter was able to obtain information from a crime definer. Without this, they had previously been unable to talk about this in terms of charges. But the difficulty in such criminal cases is mentioned, if not highlighted, in terms of the police looking for individual or corporate liability. In previous cases, no prosecutions had been made, as there was no clear single individual responsible.

The Sunday Mirror (17 May 1999) went on to openly discuss the idea of the law needing to be clarified for cases involving corporations:

Justice as law catches up with corporate killers

Politicians, both Tory and Labour, refused to accept responsibility for starving the rail network of funds and failing to insist on rapid action on the automatic safety system common in Europe.

Giant companies and their directors cannot be allowed to wriggle off the hook when they are responsible for disasters that devastate lives.

As we reveal today, Government plans for new laws to make it easier to prosecute of directors and other senior employees on the grounds of gross negligence are welcome.

Under the current legislation there is a ‘catch 22’ that makes this virtually impossible.

In the Southall train crash charges of corporate manslaughter were not brought because a single individual could not be found responsible.

This is clearly a nonsense and everyone knows it.

Bosses on obscene salaries, giant bonuses, golden share options and platinum pensions must be forced to accept the responsibility for the health and safety of their customers.

All the way to the dock of the Old Bailey if necessary.

This editorial took a refreshing stance by directly pointing to corporate responsibility (‘corporate killers’), although this lies with companies only and not with politicians. There is no sense that events should be picked apart to understand how governments can run down public services before selling them off and how they can then permit companies to abuse these services for profit. Lynch (2000) points out that one problem with corporate crime in terms of news coverage is its complexity. A child abuse case is simple and easily recognizable to the public. We have ‘good’ and ‘evil’, as in the cases we examined earlier in this book. In cases of corporate crime, politicians may be interwoven into companies and their interests. And in the Paddington case, it appears that one of the Rail companies was itself given the role of checking standards. In the text above, the writer strives for simplification by creating a polarity of the ‘fat cat’ bosses and their customers. This seeks to give the public their ‘evil-doer’. But as Fiske (1989) points out, this can, in some ways, simply serve the ideological purpose of ritualizing and neutralizing the public challenge to those in power.

What is also highly relevant in this case is the way that governments may suggest that they have plans to change the law. While, in fact, in 2007 a new law ‘The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act’ was introduced, this was not widely covered by the news media. The nature of news reporting is fragmented, and there will be no follow-up. Scholars of news reporting show how news, including crime and disaster reporting, happens in fragmented ways (Benthall, 1993). The news may tell us a lot about the suffering in one place at a particular time, but attention will soon shift onto something else. The attention span of the news media may have little connection to the actual flow of events at the place of reporting. A famine may go on long after the news media have moved onto something else. Nash (2008) points out that in the cases of disaster reporting, there may be some mention of causes and responsibility, but these will never be fully investigated and will be backgrounded by issues of suffering, and there will certainly be no follow-up to report on whether the causes and responsibilities have been addressed. And this is true of the coverage of the Paddington crash. As Minkes and Minkes (2010: 75) point out, the 2007 law still failed to address the weaknesses in previous laws in which individual responsibility had to be clear.

There were direct criticisms of the profits made by the rail companies, as in the Daily Mail:

Anger at Railtrack’s GBP 1.3m a day profits (5 November 1999)

However, there is no use of legal language. This did not become a sustained part of the way that events were discussed. There was no actual connection pointing to profit seeking as a cause of the crash. Profit was rather presented as evidence of the greed and immorality of the companies. Again, this appears to have become part of the ritualized way that the news media provides the public with confirmation of what we all know, that ‘while we all work hard to earn limited money, corporate fat cats are getting away with so much’.

Over the next few months, the story resurfaced and the results of investigations appeared, although the final verdict was not reached for several years. And one clear reason events like this one do not gain the same kind of coverage as other types of crime is the length of time they often cover, which may not fit with the usual rituals of crime reporting.

In April of the following year, after a report by the police was made, the Daily Mail (1 April 1999) reported the following:

Rail chiefs will escape justice over Paddington

RAIL chiefs will not face corporate manslaughter charges over the Paddington train crash, the Daily Mail can reveal.

Although detectives have concluded there is proof of ‘negligence and incompetence’ in the lead-up to the accident which killed 31, they say the ‘unsatisfactory’ state of the law makes it impossible to launch a successful prosecution for manslaughter.

Then the events as they happened were repeated, and the text then returned to the issue of there being no criminal charges:

Families of victims were last night infuriated by the decision not to press charges. Denman Groves of Hartpury, Gloucestershire, who lost his 25-year-old daughter Juliet, said: ‘We are all bitterly disappointed that the law of the land is so naive that it can’t deal with this murderous type of action. As far as I’m still concerned, my daughter and the others were really murdered by Railtrack’.

[. . .]

Ministers are under pressure to change the law on corporate manslaughter to make it easier for police to press charges in cases such as the Paddington and Southall rail crashes or the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, which killed 193 off Zeebrugge in 1987. At present, a corporation can be found guilty of manslaughter only if a particular senior individual is proved to have been grossly negligent.

Police are also understood to have ruled out the possibility of bringing lesser charges under section 34 of the Offences Against the Person Act, which deals with endangering the safety of train passengers.

A source close to the Paddington case said yesterday: ‘The decision not to charge anyone with corporate manslaughter is very regrettable and undoubtedly a crushing disappointment for survivors and victims’ families. But it is unavoidable.’ It is understood that the police inquiry has highlighted serious negligence or incompetence within Railtrack and by Michael Hodder, the Thames train driver who lost his life when he went through a red signal.

[. . .]

There will be no charges. It is possible Railtrack may be prosecuted under Health and Safety legislation. If found guilty, the company could be fined heavily but no executives would be jailed

What is of note in this article is that it takes no moral tone of its own. Neither the companies nor their bosses are monsterized for ‘escaping justice’, as the headline reports. We are told that ‘[m]inisters are under pressure to change the law on corporate manslaughter’, but we are not told who is creating this pressure. It appears in this case that the pressure is from the families, but this has been backgrounded to hint at something greater. What is backgrounded in this text, crucially, are some of the details of the actions of the rail companies and the government. We are told only that ‘the police inquiry has highlighted serious negligence or incompetence’. The journalist has not created links between the actual details of the government decision to not install expensive safety technology in order to control stock prices prior to privatization, cuts in training, cuts in safety measures, cuts in staffing in order to promote profits and the decision not to bring criminal charges. Earlier in the coverage of the events, employees were cited as saying that they had been told to ignore obvious faults in order to meet targets. None of this is brought out. Yet in the coverage of more traditional crimes involving large-scale deaths, it is more usual for all the details to be drawn out on each occasion the story is revived (e.g. the James Bulger murder case).

The language used for the lack of prosecution is also described through the moderate words of one source who described it as ‘very regrettable and undoubtedly a crushing disappointment’.

Finally, we see how the language of criminal prosecution had been completely abandoned by reporters when the tenth anniversary of the event was commemorated in 2009. We see this in the Sun (5 October 2009):

SURVIVORS of the Paddington rail crash have marked the tenth anniversary of the accident at a memorial service for the 31 people who died in the tragedy.

The article summarizes the events, playing down the suffering and carnage, foregrounding the mourning and solidarity of those present. It ends by pointing to the fines given to the companies:

A subsequent inquiry into the crash by Lord Cullen was highly critical of Railtrack and of the training of Mr Hodder.

Thames Trains was later fined £2 million, while in March 2007 Network Rail – Railtrack’s successor company – was fined £4 million for health and safety breaches at Paddington.

Lord Adonis said: ‘Paddington was a terrible tragedy and one of the worst in the world’s history.

‘I am glad that lessons were learned from the accident and that railway safety has improved but that does not reduce the nature of the tragedy and the impact it had on so many lives.’

The links between what took place, the appalling decisions and practices that led to the ‘accident’ or ‘tragedy’, and the lack of criminal prosecution are not mentioned. While during the events there were some calls in the press to change the law, so that corporations can be prosecuted, there is no mention of whether this has actually taken place. The continual use of the terms ‘accident’ and ‘tragedy’ sidelines the legal issues which were present and which resulted in the companies being fined.

What we see from the press coverage of the actions of corporations that led to over 30 dead and 400 injured is that they are treated, in the first place, within the rituals of disaster news reporting. By the time reporters turn their attention to issues of responsibility, the horror of the events may already have been replaced by new horrors in the news. The coverage only rarely used the kind of language associated with crime that we might find in other crimes, and reporters resisted using ‘monsterization’ terms for the corporate bosses. And we see that through the fragmented nature of news reporting, different information is not joined up; since in the cases of corporate crime there is complexity and a longer time span, it is harder for reporters to use the same kind of news frames.

In terms of ‘crime’ and ‘criminality’ here, importantly, the government escaped serious charges. They had created a deregulatory climate which resulted in an environment of safety downgrading. They had also put in place a system of targets with fines for companies running delayed services. This system of meeting targets and tales of rankings have been heavily criticized for the way that they can, in schools, hospitals, the police and universities, as well as rail services, distract from the actual quality of the service being offered, which is quite the opposite of what they claim to represent (Power, 1997). The government, too, was responsible for the very downgrading of services in the first place. Yet there was no mention of any criminal responsibility in this context in the news media.

Conclusion

It is certainly not the case that the news media ignore corporate crime. On the contrary, there is public interest in criticizing the elite, as is described in the work of Fiske (1989). In particular, we find this in the news media through criticism of corporate ‘fat cats’, although precise responsibilities and crimes are not clearly articulated.

Importantly, in the Paddington case, the news coverage could be seen as playing an important role in placing pressure on the government to introduce the new law to address corporate manslaughter, even if this law was again flawed in the same way as its predecessor. However, cases in which laws are changed will most likely not be addressed by journalists. The nature of news coverage is that it is unsustained and fragmented. While tabloid newspapers may report on any news events, no matter how trivial, involving well-known child murderers, they will be less likely to revisit more complex topics, such as legal developments around corporate law. One reason for this is the way that child murderers can be personalized and ‘monsterized’, and therefore made memorable, whereas corporate criminals are not, and in many ways they embody many of the values celebrated in our societies, such as ambition, cunning, individualism, and the ability to make money.

A number of factors certainly make this reporting different from other crime reporting. This can be seen in the language of the Paddington case study:

● Corporate crimes can be of a varied nature and will therefore be placed into different news frames by reporters. In the case of Paddington, this followed the rituals and language of disaster reporting. There appear to be no rituals specifically for corporate crime.

● Corporate level crime may go against established news frames and therefore be difficult to develop as stories. At the time of writing, news stories were appearing in the British press in which officers working in welfare benefits offices had been instructed to mislead claimants in order to remove them from the system and meet government targets. One problem for journalists seeking to develop this story as a crime is that the victims, benefits claimants, are normally represented as those who are a burden on society. This creates problems in terms of the victim/evil-doer opposition required for more personalized or simplified crime reporting.

● There is a lack of the traditional definers of crime. Offenders are normally defined for journalists by courts, and police are not dealing with offenders through a language of crime. Rather, corporate crimes may be dealt with through ‘inquiries’ led not by legal people but by those familiar with the industry/sector. This means that such crimes are often dealt with as ‘accidents’ or as ‘greed’, which calls for vague punishment, such as the call for resignations or ‘tightening of legislation’.

● Corporate crime is, on one level, complex. One important news value is that events must be easily understood. Even when it appears to be clear that the victims are the public and the criminals the bankers, what has actually been done and the true nature of the crime is harder to pinpoint. And the journalists will need a ‘hook’ around which to base the story in the form of an official comment, a press release or a new event. In long drawn-out inquiries, these might be hard to find. Media researchers show that the attention of the news media on longer running events is, at best, fickle.

● Finally, of course, corporations are part of the power structures of our societies. The mass media, in turn, are owned by corporations and funded by yet other corporations, the advertisers. Governments tend to make laws that favour corporations. Corporations have a powerful public relations machinery to present the restrictive actions of governments as ‘red tape’ and ‘restricting their ability to compete’. And media scholars have shown just how much of what now becomes news output has its origins in PR (Bennett, 2005).