State crime

Green & Ward: State crime

• Illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by or with the complicity of state agencies

McLaughlin: 4 categories of state crime

• Political: e.g. Electoral fraud

• Economic e.g. economic corruption

• Social e.g. violation of human rights

• Crimes by security and police forces e.g. illegal surveillance

Kramer & Michalowski: State-corporate crime

• State-initiated corporate crime: state initiates, directs or approves corporate crimes

• State-facilitated corporate crime: when states fail to regulate and control corporate behaviour, making crime easier

• e.g. Challenger space shuttle disaster. NASA under strict pressure to maintain strict launch schedule, safety concerns downplayed to meet deadlines and budgetary constraints. 7 died.

Domestic law

• Acts defined by law of nation state

• Change what is considered a crime, avoid criminalising their own actions (change law so they aren’t criminal)

Social harms and zemiology

• Illegal and legal acts causing harm

• Prevents states from making laws that allow them to misbehave (if it causes harm, it is state crime)

Labelling

• Whether an act is a crime depends on whether the audience for that act define it as such

• Social construct = what people regard as a crime can vary over time

• e.g. ruling class ideology, defining what a crime is, criminalising the working class etc

International law

• Action by or on behalf of state that violates international law

• Globally agreed definition, intentionally designed to deal with state crime

• Focus largely on war crimes

Schwedinger & Schwedinger: Human rights

• Define crimes in terms of violation of basic human rights (rather than breaking of law)

• States that practise racism, sexism, economic exploitation etc are committing crimes

• e.g. of transgressive criminology (goes beyond traditional boundaries of criminology - doesn’t have to be illegal)

Cohen: Culture of denial

• States conceal and legitimate their human rights crimes

• Denying victims or injuries, deny responsibility, say it was for the greater good etc (based off Matza’s techniques of neutralisation)