ABSTRACT
The level of present and future trust in law enforcement agencies is a powerful influence on views about the legitimacy of crime control. This article focuses upon a particular sub-set of ‘the trust issues’, the prosecution of serious fraud and allied financial crimes, which episodically comes to the political fore. In some countries, mostly but not exclusively poor ones, in which economic and social power are highly concentrated, anger at fraud and corruption can manifest itself in demands for prosecution of elites as well as recovery of the proceeds of their frauds and bribes. This is not a new phenomenon. In the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble, Viscount Molesworth called for the directors of the South Sea Company to be declared guilty by Parliamentary fiat and to suffer the Roman punishment for parricide – being sewn into a sack with a snake, cockerel and monkey and thrown into the river to drown (Carswell, 1960: 174). A look at some African, Asian and South American countries – where senior politicians, almost invariably former leaders, go to jail – illustrates this. (Sceptics might note the frequency with which, in time, similar allegations of kleptocracy are made against the incoming administrations, demonstrating the weakness of criminal law alone as an instrument of prevention.) Even in the USA, post-banking bail-out, this public rage has been directed at Wall Street elites (and, after the Gulf of Mexico disaster, at BP). We normally blame the people perceived as causing the problem: this locus of blame is influenced by both socially constructed values and media campaigns, etc., and can focus on ‘criminals’, crime non-preventers, investigators, prosecutors, judges and/or juries.
