State Crime

What do Green ad Ward define state crime as?

‘Illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by, or with the complicity of, state agencies’

What is domestic law?

Chambliss: Acts defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in pursuit of their jobs as representatives of the state.

• Example: MP’s Expenses

What is semiology?

• Michalowski (1985): State crime includes illegal acts but also legally permissible acts whose consequences are similar to those of illegal acts in the harm that they cause

• Hillyard (2004): Replace the study of crime with semiology regardless of whether the act is against the law

What is international law?

Rothe and Mullins (2008): State crime is an action by or on behalf of a state that violates international law and/or a state's own domestic law

What are human rights?

Schwendinger (1975): State crime should be defined as a violation of people’s basic human rights by the state and their agents

What are types of state crime?

• Political crimes

• Crimes by security, military and police

• Economic crimes

• Social and cultural crimes

What is a political crime?

Censorship or Corruption:

• According to the Corruption Index put together by Transparency International, there seems to be a correlation between corruption, war and conflict, and poverty.

• Somalia, North Korea, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq are at the bottom of the Corruption Index.

• Scandinavian countries plus Canada are the least corrupt.

What are crimes by security, military and police?

Genocide, Torture, Imprisonment without Trial, and Disappearance of Dissidents:

• Genocide: Rwanda 1994 (Hutus against Tutsis), Cambodia 1970s (Khmer Rouge), Bosnia Herzegovina 1990s (Bosnian Serbs against Bosnian Muslims)

• IWT - Guantanamo Bay

• DoD - China, Russia, Saudi Arabia

• Rummel calculated that from 1900-1987, over 169 million people had been murdered by governments, excluding deaths during war

What are types of economic crimes?

• Violations of health and safety laws:

  • Chernobyl Disaster

• Economic Policies which cause harm to the population:

  • Austerity

What are social and cultural crimes?

Institutional Racism:

• Police force targeting certain groups in society, Ethnocentric Curriculum ignores certain groups' history

• Destruction of native cultures and heritage:

  • ISIS destruction of Churches and shrines in Mosul

  • USA: Destruction of Native Indian sites and lands

How can you tell the seriousness of state crime?

• Scale

• State as a source of law

• Culture of denial

• Neutralisation theory

What is the scale of state crimes?

• States are large and powerful entities; they can cause large and powerful, often widespread harm.

• For instance, in Cambodia between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge government killed up to 1/5 of the entire population.

What is the state as a source of law?

• States have the power to conceal their crimes, make them harder to detect, and change the law to benefit their deviance.

• The concept of National Sovereignty means that it is difficult for international bodies to intervene

What is the culture of denial of state crimes?

Cohen:

• Stage 1: ‘It didn’t happen’

• Stage 2: ‘If it did happen, ‘it is something else’

• Stage 3: ‘Even if it is what you say it is, it’s justified’

What is the neutralisation theory of state crimes?

Sykes and Matza (1957)

• Justification of the act through:

  • Denial of the victim

  • Denial of injury

  • Denial of responsibility

  • Condemning the condemners

  • Appeal to higher loyalty

How can you explain state crime?

• Integrational theory

• Modernity

• Social conditions

What is the Integrational theory?

• Green and Ward: This theory suggests that state crime arises from similar circumstances to those of other crimes.

• Integrating three factors and how these factors interact generates state crimes:

  • Motivation

  • Opportunity

  • Lack of controls

What is modernity?

Bauman (1989) suggests that certain features of modern society made state crimes possible:

1. A division of labour: Each person is responsible for one task, so no one is fully responsible.

2. Bureaucratisation: Normalisation of the act by making it repetitive and routine.

3. Instrumental rationality: Rational and efficient methods to achieve a goal, regardless of the goal itself.

4. Science and technology: Scientific and technological knowledge to justify the means and the motive

What are social conditions?

• Unlike citizen crime, state crimes tend to be crimes of obedience rather than deviance.

• Kelman and Hamilton identify three features that produce crimes of obedience:

  1. Authorisation: Acts are approved of by those in power. Normal moral principles are replaced by the duty to obey.

  2. Routinisation: Turn the act into a routine behaviour so it can be performed in a detached manner.

  3. Dehumanisation: The victims are portrayed as subhuman, so normal morality doesn’t apply.