8.3 State Crime

• What is Green & Ward's definition of state crime?


  illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by, or with the complicity of state agencies
• For what 2 reasons is state crime the most serious type of crime?

  The extreme scale of state crime

  The state is the source of law so it is most able to conceal its crimes
• 4 types of state crime (McLaughlin)


  Political crimes

  Crimes by security and police forces

  Economic crimes

  Social and cultural crimes
• Rwanda Genocide (Example of state crime)


  There were 2 groups - hutus and tutsis

  Gained independence in 1962 and the hutu majority gained power

  civil war caused the government to fuel race hate propoganda against the tutsis

  800,000 tutis were killed and 1/3 of hutus are estimated to have taken part
• What did Kramer & Michalowski say about state-corporate crime?


  State initiated- states initiate, direct or approve corporate crime

  E.g. challenger disaster - negligent and cost-cutting behaviour

  State facilitated - states fail to regulate corporate activity which makes committing crime easier

  Deepwater horizon oil rig - the bp rig exploded and killed 11 workers, causing the largest accidental oil spill in history
• Illegal wars

  Form of war-related crime - under international law war can only be declared by the un security council
• What did Kramer & Michalowski say about examples of illegal wars?


  To justify the invasion of Iraq as self-defence the USA and UK falsely claimed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction
• Why is using Domestic Law not always effective?

  • using the state's domestic law is inadequate because it ignores the fact that states have the power to define law to avoid criminalising themselves
  • they can also make laws allowing the state to carry out harmful acts eg. nazi germany
  • also leads to inconsistencies as different states have different laws
• Causing harm (Hillyard)


  Including not just illegal acts but also legally permissable acts whose consequences are similar to those of illegal acts in the harm they cause. We should replace the study of crime with zemiology, the study of harms, whether or not they are against the law

  potentially vague - what level of crime must occur before an act is defined as a crime? who decides what counts as a crime?
• Violation of human rights (Schwendinger)


  any country that denies its people fundamental human rights which are available to people elsewhere, can be considered to be guilty of state crime

  
  

  -disagreements on what counts as a human right.
• The authoritarian personality (Adorno)


  willingness to obey the orders of superiors without question, They argue that at the time of WWII many Germans had authoritarian personality types due to the punitive disciplinarian socialisation patterns that were common at the time

  
  

  BUT Milgram 's experiment showed people more obedient when ordered by people of power personality of people involved made no difference
• The use of modern science in genocide (Bauman)


  -features of modern society that made the holocaust possible, from the railways, transporting victims to the death camps to

  the industrially produced gas used to kill them

  -doesn't explain other genocides that haven't used science/ rationality eg Rwandan genocide
• The culture of denial (Cohen)


  recent years have seen the growing impact of the international human rights movements, states now have to make a greater effort to conceal or justify their human rights or to re-label them as not crimes
• Techniques of neutralisation (Cohen)


  Identifies ways that the state uses neutralisation techniques to justify human rights violations

  denial of victim - vilifying the victim to suggest they were the actual villain in the situation

  denial of injury - downplaying the harm done to the victim

  denial of responsibility - the suggestion that people were obeying orders from other authority figures and hold no blame

  condemning the condemners - suggesting they are only being blamed because of another systemic issue

  appeal to higher loyalty - claim to be serving a higher cause