ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 considers the wide range of ways in which criminal law responds to criminal behaviour involving more than one person in the commission of a crime. Alternative forms of criminal responsibility discussed in this chapter include corporate and vicarious liability, where companies and organisations can be responsible for crime that their employees commit. Discussion also covers complicity, which deals with crimes where more than one person has played an active part in the criminal behaviour; specific statutory offences designed to respond to the threats posed by organised crime and terrorism; and state crime offences, which hold States and governments liable for crime under certain circumstances. The second section of the chapter looks at how criminal justice enforces this type of crime. It argues that criminal law and criminal justice, which are designed to respond to one individual person harming another individual person in some way, have struggled both to explain how people who help others to commit crime should be held responsible, and to enforce these criminal offences in a way which fully and accurately reflects the social harm that such behaviours cause. The chapter concludes by linking discussion back to the roadmap theories in Chapter 1.
