Crimes of the wealthy and powerful cleverly obscured
BLACK Friday arrived for Christopher Panayiotou and Oscar Pistorius.
As people fell over their feet to scoop up so-called bargains in a consumerist craze imported from the US, long prison terms were imposed on Panayiotou and Pistorius for gender violence.
In a Marxist reading of crime in capitalist society, a comparison between the case scenario presented by these two men with that of the crime of the rich and powerful (Robert Mugabe and Jacob Zuma being cases in point), provides a beautiful illustration of how power mystifies and makes the crimes of the powerful, privileged and wealthy disappear.
While it is right that Panayiotou’s and Pistorius’s crimes should not go unsanctioned, it is also interesting that Mugabe, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Africa, received a blanket amnesty for any crimes he may have committed during his disastrous nearly 40 years’ rule of Africa’s (now defunct) “breadbasket”.
No doubt, if we are able to get rid of Zuma at some point, he and his cronies and members of his family will receive their own blanket amnesty “exit deal” for their industrial-scale looting and destruction of our beautiful country.
The crimes of the relatively powerless ( Panayiotou and Pistorius) are easily detected and punished to great fanfare.
Radical criminologists, inspired by the work of the infamous Karl Marx, have conceptualised and problematised this traditional understanding of crime as skewed, to blur our grasp of the much more profound criminal behaviour of the wealthy and powerful.
I suggest that such an understanding of crime is crucial for our survival in a country run by gangsters servicing a shadow state alongside the constitutional one.
Pistorius and Panayiotou are small fry in this larger context.
This idea is well formulated by radical British criminologist Steven Box in his book, Power, Crime and Mystification (published 1983), in which he argues “[m]aybe what is stuffed into our consciousness as the crime problem is in fact an illusion, a trick to deflect attention away from other more serious crimes and victimising behaviours which objectively cause the vast bulk of avoidable death, injury and deprivation”.
One way in which the “crimes” of the relatively powerless are amplified to divert attention away from the shenanigans of the powerful and wealthy, as Box alludes to, is to criminalise so-called “victimless crimes”.
By these I mean behaviour which does not hurt the environment or other people.
Corruption is certainly not one of them, despite the fact that Zuma’s lawyers famously argued and convinced the NPA otherwise.
Corruption diverts money away from worthy causes such as road maintenance (a huge problem in the Eastern Cape), medical services and schools.
On this point, if Zuma did in fact receive the equivalent of a R250-billion bribe from the Russians to facilitate the nuclear deal, the tax on that (at 40%) would be enough to subsidise free quality higher education for the next three years.
But if he does not even bother to submit tax returns . . .
Decriminalising victimless crimes, such as those considered below, has an important role in our society.
The idea of radical intervention of criminal law in the lives of ordinary people does not only obscure other greater forms of crime, but also overloads the criminal law with pointless policing and processing of victimless deviance.
This diverts money away from other worthy causes, as I pointed out above.
The suggestion of radical non-intervention of the criminal law by radical criminologists, such as Edwin Schur, was first made in the 1970s.
Radical criminology is known as critical criminology in the UK and conflict theory in the US.
Examples of such victimless crimes are gambling, drugs for recreational use and certain forms of prostitution (but not including pimping or human trafficking).
Although these behaviours might be frowned upon in polite society, a case could be made that they do not produce victims.
Many rejoiced when Panayiotou’s family lost their “illegal” gambling operation allegedly fronted by an internet café in Grahamstown, but who did they really injure or harm with this operation?
To mention only one example, compare this with the spraying of ganja plants around Lusikisiki with carcinogenic herbicide bound to damage the environment for future generations to come.
Finally, it is worth reflecting on how the crimes of the wealthy and the powerful are cleverly obscured, and how they remain undefined in the criminal law.
We can make great inroads on criminality by focusing on crimes made possible by structures of inequality (such as domestic and gender violence in a climate of patriarchy).
This has been done to a remarkable effect in Australia with enhancing the services to refuges to empower abused women.
This is greatly helped by enlightened women (known as “femocats”) in strategic positions in government and well-placed NGOs.
Perhaps this is an opportunity to rethink Black Friday for relatively powerless offenders and, I suggest, it is considerably more valuable as a nuanced concept.