Abstract
The aim of the first chapter is to introduce the reader to the main scope of the book; namely, a critical understanding of the reasons why occupational health and safety (OHS) crimes are under-criminalised in both Britain and Italy. The book uses Pearce (1976) Crimes of the Powerful as a theoretical framework to make sense of the under-criminalisation of these crimes. The chapter explains the rationale for comparing these two jurisdictions. It explores how basic political and legal principles, such as the separation of powers doctrine, due-process, crime-control, adversarial and inquisitorial criminal justice system traditions, might affect the everyday practices of occupational health and safety enforcement institutions and officers and cause the under-criminalisation of OHS crimes.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout the thesis I use the term incidents rather than accidents because I agree with Tombs and Whyte (2007) who “view safety crimes as crimes of violence. Though this is not an original approach, it is, as we shall see, one which, in the context of academic criminology and general representations of occupational injuries, a rarity. For us [Tombs and Whyte], this lack of criminological attention to safety crimes as crimes of violence is less a quality of the latter phenomena, more a failure of the discipline to reflect upon long-standing, but ontologically weak, assumptions. Thus, once occupational injuries are viewed not as accidents but as incidents which are not only largely preventable, but which the law requires to be prevented, then they fall within the ambit of criminology. Then, if we consider these illegalities in terms of their potential or actual consequences - injury and death - we realise that these look remarkably similar to the results of those events that most men and women as well as policy-makers, politicians, and academics, deem to be ‘proper’ violence. Most crucially, these latter conceptions of violence are […] based upon an implicit association of violence with the inter-personal and with intention, both qualities that are often absent from safety crimes . That safety crimes are crimes of (actual or potential) violence is, for us, unequivocal; yet to reach this conclusion one must generally move beyond criminology, to understandings of violence developed in other disciplines” (Tombs and Whyte 2007, pp. 5–6).
- 2.
This research refers to the British occupational health and safety enforcement institutions because the HSE has jurisdiction is England, Wales and Scotland. Hence, referring to the English and Wales OHS enforcement institution would be wrong. However, the reader should be aware that the Scottish political and legal system, due to devolution occurred from the British parliament in recent years, is different from the English one, and arguably adopting a criminal justice system and political model resembling the continental due-process non-adversarial one more. In addition, the fieldwork informing this comparative analysis has been conducted in England and thus the study omits to analyse and compare the opinions of Scottish occupational health and safety enforcement officers.
- 3.
The inquisitorial name derives from the religion inquisitions which characterised justice during the middle ages, but this term is slightly misleading in this context. Hence, in this book I will adopt the term non-adversarial , rather than inquisitorial .
- 4.
It is important to note that these models are different in principle, which means that policies and practices can, at times, be quite similar across jurisdictions. Only the principles and policies that are relevant to this research study will be analysed.
- 5.
See Footnote 2 above.
- 6.
Proactive describes enforcement institutions’ pre-planned annual enforcement activities, while reactive describes enforcement activities that occurs after incidents .
- 7.
Financial Law or Legge Finanziaria.
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Canciani, D. (2019). Introduction. In: The Politics and Practice of Occupational Health and Safety Law Enforcement. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98509-1_1
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