ABSTRACT
How have safety crimes developed in relation to the mainstream criminal legal process? This is the first of two chapters that focuses upon various dimensions of this question. This chapter discusses the way in which the law has sought to deal with safety crimes, on one hand as ‘regulatory’ offences, and on the other, as ‘crimes of violence’. The question of how the criminal legal process deals with safety crimes immediately raises questions of power. In nineteenth-century Britain, the very first criminal laws that were introduced to protect workers from unsafe working practices, the Factories Acts, proved difficult to implement because of the state's institutional failure to impose criminal status on members of the wealthy class of factory owners. This story provides a key focus of this chapter. The fate of the Factory Acts is also a starting point for this chapter because it illustrates a perennial problem for those who argue for the criminalisation of safety offences: how can a criminal justice system that is designed to deal with lower class offenders be mobilised to punish the relatively powerful individuals and organisations (directors, senior managers and companies) who commit safety crimes?
