Understanding the seriousness of corporate crime: Some lessons for the new 'corporate manslaughter' offence

The measurement of public attitudes towards the criminal law has become an important area of research in recent years because of the perceived desirability of ensuring that the legal system reflects broader societal values. In particular, studies into public perceptions of crime seriousness have attempted to measure the degree of concordance that exists between law and public opinion in the organization and enforcement of criminal offences. These understandings of perceived crime seriousness are particularly important in relation to high-profile issues where public confidence in the law is central to the legal agenda, such as the enforcement of work-related fatality cases. A need to respond to public concern over this issue was cited as a primary justification for the introduction of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007. This article will suggest that, although literature looking at the perceived seriousness of corporate crime and, particularly, health and safety offences is limited in volume and generalist in scope, important lessons can be gleaned from existing literature, and pressing questions are raised that demand further empirical investigation.

The automatic identification and prioritisation of criminal networks from police crime data

The identification of criminal networks is not a routine exploratory process within the current practice of the law enforcement authorities; rather it is triggered by specific evidence of criminal activity being investigated. A network is identified when a criminal comes to notice and any associates who could also be potentially implicated would need to be identified if only to be eliminated from the enquiries as suspects or witnesses as well as to prevent and/or detect crime. However, an identified network may not be the one causing most harm in a given area.. This paper identifies a methodology to identify all of the criminal networks that are present within a Law Enforcement Area, and, prioritises those that are causing most harm to the community. Each crime is allocated a score based on its crime type and how recently the crime was committed; the network score, which can be used as decision support to help prioritise it for law enforcement purposes, is the sum of the individual crime scores.

‘Anything can happen in the next half-hour’: Gerry Anderson’s transnational science fiction

Gerry Anderson’s 1960s puppet series have hybrid identities in relation to their medial, geographical, and production histories. This chapter ranges over his science fiction series from Supercar (1961) to Joe 90 (1968), arguing that Anderson’s television science fiction in that period crossed many kinds of boundary and border. Anderson’s television series were a compromise between his desire to make films for adults versus an available market for children’s television puppet programs, and aimed to appeal to a cross-generational family audience. They were made on film, using novel effects, for a UK television production culture that still relied largely on live and videotaped production. While commissioned by British ITV companies, the programs had notable success in the USA, achieving national networked screening as well as syndication, and they were designed to be transatlantic products. The transnational hero teams and security organisations featured in the series supported this internationalism, and simultaneously negotiated between the cultural meanings of Britishness and Americanness. By discussing their means of production, the aesthetic and narrative features of the programs, their institutional contexts, and their international distribution, this chapter argues that Anderson’s series suggest ways of rethinking the boundaries of British science fiction television in the 1960s.