Counterblast: crime, harm and the state-corporate nexus

Tombs, Steve and Whyte, David (2015). Counterblast: crime, harm and the state-corporate nexus. Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 54(1) pp. 91–95.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12116

Abstract

The dominant role that corporations play in our lives makes them appear to us as a fact of life. Corporations now take credit for, and profit from, providing most of the food that we eat, the clothes we wear, the communications systems we use, the films we watch, the music we listen to and so on. What corporations do well or badly fundamentally affects our chances of a healthy life. Corporations produce the chemicals that end up in the air we breathe and the food we eat, just as they produce the drugs that seek to keep us healthy and to prolong our lives. Corporations are central to virtually all systems of childcare, social care or health care, criminal justice, education, energy and transport. The presence of corporations in every aspect of our lives is so overbearing that it makes it seem as if this presence is both normal and natural. There exists – popularly, politically and academically – a resignation to the ubiquitousness and power of the corporation as the dominant form through which the provision of goods and services is, should, even must, be organised across the globe.