Globalization

In the past half century or so, societies have become increasingly interconnected. Through the process of globalization, activities that used to be contained within national or regional borders have spread to other countries and continents, integrating the world's people in complex ways. The rise of new communication and transportation technologies has made it possible to exchange goods, ideas, and populations across great distances. The pace at which these exchanges now occur and the shifting ability of regulators to keep up with them have positive and negative implications for criminal justice ethics. Globalization has created massive opportunities for crime as well as more advanced systems to control it. One of the more important ethical questions in the globalization era will be how to balance privacy rights with control over increasingly sophisticated criminal activities.

It can be argued that globalization has always existed, and that the current era is nothing more than an increase in the pace of regional integration and exchange (a quantitative change). Certainly, societies were involved in trade and exploration long before the modern age of nation-states. The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries brought new technologies that helped rapidly expand these activities. Railroads and the steam engine allowed traders to grow their markets far beyond local borders; the telegraph allowed governments to coordinate their economic policies to support these spreading markets. These changes sped up the pace of integration to such a degree that many observers see a change in the world order itself: a change of “type” rather than “degree.” From this perspective, the globalization that has occurred in the modern and postmodern eras has fundamentally remade the world's economic, political, and social systems. Accordingly, managing crime is a different endeavor today than it was preglobalization, requiring new ways of thinking and new systems of control rather than just a faster pace of response by law enforcement.

There are two qualitative changes associated with globalization that are important for criminologists to consider. One is the decoupling of activities from their geographic origins and the resulting global movement of goods and ideas.

Borders have become permeable, and in some areas essentially meaningless, making it difficult to track the movement of money, people, or contraband goods. A global digital infrastructure has been established, removing limits to communication and ultimately enabling new types of crime and surveillance. The other major change is the decreased authority of established power sources such as nation-states and the rise of alternative power sources; this shift has challenged old ways of controlling crime.

Some of the new power sources are intergovernmental and require intricate cooperation between countries as well as reduced national sovereignty. Others are extragovernmental (such as insurgent groups or transnational terrorist organizations), operating outside of state agreements and laws. Both of these qualitative changes contribute to the sense of a “driverless car;” in other words, it seems unclear which groups or forces are in control of globalization and whether its processes can be modified or reversed. This perception can muddle previously settled ethical questions regarding criminal justice, which have typically been addressed at the national level.

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