State Crime

Definitions of State Crime:

• Green and Ward define State crime as: ‘Illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by, or with the complicity of, state agencies’

• 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

• 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 Zemiology regardless of whether the act is against the law

• 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

• Human Rights:

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

Types of State Crime:

• Key Thinker: Eugene McLaughlin

• Political Crimes:

  • 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.

• 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

• Economic Crimes:

  • Violations of health and safety laws:

    • Chernobyl Disaster

  • Economic Policies which cause harm to the population:

    • Austerity

• 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

Seriousness of State Crime:

• Scale:

  • 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.

• 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

• Culture of Denial:

  • 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’

• Neutralisation Theory:

  • 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

Explaining State Crime:

• 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

• 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

• 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.