ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the widespread corporate domestic and foreign payoffs and illegal political contributions. A former US deputy attorney general stated that the Justice Department does not even know the magnitude of damage done by undetected corporate crimes—the dollar losses or the physical injuries to the public and to employees. The costs of ordinary crimes are estimated primarily in financial terms, along with the social costs involving the fear that such crimes cause in the general population. The increased recognition of corporate crime in recent years, by professional criminologists and others, has been a quite natural response to identifiable social forces, perhaps particularly the dramatic increase in the impact of the major corporations on American society. Corporate violence has been defined as "behavior producing an unreasonable risk of physical harm to consumers, employees, or other persons as a result of deliberate decision-making by corporate executives or culpable negligence on their part".
