Industrial Meatpacking, Labor, and Migration Controls: Implications for White-Collar and Corporate Crime Research

• In Event: Green Criminology V: Environment and Corporations

Abstract

Industrial food systems offer a range of criminological access points for examining the multifaceted harms of white-collar and corporate crime. The present study focuses on the meatpacking industry, the range of harms intrinsic to the contemporary mass-scale capture, commodification, and killing of pigs, and the racialized labor force that makes industrial foodways possible. Drawing from early findings of a multiyear collaborative ethnography from rural Minnesota and North Carolina, we emphasize the criminogenic nature of existing regulatory frameworks that govern how people, animals, and food products move across space, and the role of empirical research in mitigating legitimized harms and white-collar offenses through law and policy.

Authors

• Kenneth Sebastian Leon, Rutgers University

• Ivy Ken, George Washington University