ABSTRACT
This heading is borrowed from the title of a book published in 1979, now in its ninth edition, by Reiman, an American social scientist. In the first edition of this book, Reiman produced statistics designed to challenge conventional thinking about what counts as crime. For example, he stated that in 1974 the total number of people ‘murdered’ in the United States was 168,600: 114,000 deaths occurred as a result of occupational hazard; 20,000 from inadequate emergency medical care; 15,625 were a result of a knife or other cutting instrument, including a scalpel; 13,987 resulted from the use of firearms; 2,000 from hypodermics or prescriptions and the remainder included a range of different weapons. These figures clearly indicated quite a different understanding of the context in which, for example, murder might occur. More recently in the United Kingdom, for example, the Union of Construction, Allied Trade and Technicians (UCATT) reported that the death of five construction workers in the same week that the government announced a 35 per cent cut in the budget of the Health and Safety Executive (UCATT 5/11/10) and a visit to the website www.curethenhs.org will give a feel for some of the issues surrounding the deaths in a Staffordshire hospital from 2005 to 2008. In a similar vein, Box (1983), a UK social scientist, argued that (using the Health and Safety Executive’s own statistics) between 1973 and 1979, there were 3,291 deaths recorded as homicide by the police and a total of 11,436 deaths resulting from occupational accident or disease. In a more up-to-date assessment of the figures for the United Kingdom, Whyte (2004a: 136) suggests that ‘the total number of deaths at work, that result from health and safety crimes are likely to exceed 4,500 each year and this is before we factor in the largely unknown deaths caused by other occupational diseases’. Moreover, as Tombs and Whyte (2007: 37) state, ‘In contemporary societies, work routinely kills workers and members of the public through acute injury and chronic illness’. The widely reported and celebrated rescue of the miners trapped underground in Chile in 2010 both serves to remind us of the particularly hazardous nature of some work environments as well as the global variations in experiences of those workplaces. In addition, Whyte (2004a) reports on findings in the United States that suggest corporate fraud costs up
to 20 times more than the cost of ‘traditional’ crime. The question is, what are the common concerns for these authors in the context of criminology? There are at least four:
1. To draw our attention to a wider understanding of lawbreaking behaviour.
