State Crime

• The Seriousness Of State Crime

  1.The scale of state crime – states have control over social institutions capable of committing harm on a far greater scale than any individual, group or even corporation. They can order the police and army to arrest enemies, torture or kill. In totalitarian regimes they can use the media and education system as a source of propaganda to stir up hatred and persecution. They even have the resources to create concentration and death camps.
• The Seriousness Of State Crime

  2.The state is the source of law – the state makes and enforces the law within its borders, and can therefore make its own actions (discrimination, torture, killing) legal and allow them to continue undisturbed. Although international laws against torture and extra-judicial killing do exist, in reality they are extremely hard to enforce without launching a full scale military intervention (and such efforts often lead to more conflict, as in Syria).•
• McLaughlin’s 4 categories of state crime. (2001)

  1.Political crimes e.g. corruption and censorship2.Crimes by security and police forces such as genocide and torture3.Economic crimes e.g. violations of health and safety laws4.Social and cultural crimes like institutional racism
• -Improved communication technology has made state surveillance easier, which whilst it can be used for crime prevention can also be used to invade privacy, limit criticism of the government and even arrest political enemies.- Internet technology has also opened up the possibility of cyber warfare conducted by states (see accusations of Russian interference in US elections through hacking).
• However, the global media has made us more aware of state crimes (e.g. in Syria) and given people more ability to help (e.g. through donating to aid charities).

  + Though states can still use censorship to restrict people’s freedom, the internet makes this increasingly difficult.
• Using Domestic Law

  Chambliss (1989) defines state crime as ‘acts defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in pursuit of the jobs as representatives of the state’.

  However, this is an inadequate definition:

  1. It ignores the fact that stats have the power to make laws and can therefore avoid criminalising their behaviour.

  2. They can make laws allowing them to carry out harmful acts.

  3. It also leads to inconsistencies – what is legal on one side of a border may be illegal on the other.
• State crime

  Includes not just illegal acts but also 'legally permissible (allowable) acts whose consequences are similar to those of illegal acts' in the harm they cause
• Zemiology

  The study of harms, whether or not they are against the law
• Zemiology creates a single standard that can be applied to different states
• Zemiology prevents the state from ruling themselves 'out of court' by making laws that allow them to behave badly
• What level of harm must occur before an act is defined as a crime?

  There is a danger that this definition makes the field of study too wide
• Who decides what counts as harm?

  This just replaces the state's arbitrary definition of crime with the sociologist's equally arbitrary definition of harm
• State crime

  Socially constructed, what people regard as state crime can vary over time and between cultures or groups
• This definition prevents the sociologist imposing their own definition of state crime when this may not be how the participants (perpetrators, victims, audience) define the situation
• Kuzlarich's (2007) study of anti-Iraq War protestors found that while they saw the war as harmful and illegitimate, they were unwilling to label it criminal
• From a 'harms' perspective, the Iraq war can be seen as illegal
• It is unclear who is supposed to be the relevant audience that decides whether a state crime has been committed, or what to do if different audiences reach different verdicts
• This definition ignores the fact that audiences' definitions may be manipulated by ruling class ideology, e.g. the media may persuade the public to see a war as legitimate rather than criminal
• State crime

  Any action by or on behalf of a state that violates international law and/or a state's own domestic law
• Advantage of defining state crime based on international law

  • It does not depend on personal definitions of harm or who the relevant audience is
  • It uses globally agreed definitions of state crime
• Advantage of international law

  • It is designed to deal with state crime, unlike domestic law
• Like the laws made by individual states, international law is also a social construction involving the use of power
• International law focuses largely on war crimes and crimes against humanity, rather than other crimes such as corruption
• State crime


  Violation of people's basic human rights by the state or its agents
• States that practise racism, sexism or economic exploitation are committing crimes because they are denying people their basic human rights
• Transgressive view

  Going beyond the traditional boundaries of criminology
• If we accept that crimes are simply whatever the state says they are, we become subservient to their interests
• Advantage of defining state crime as human rights violation

  • Virtually all states care about their human rights image, because these rights are now global social norms
  • This makes them susceptible to 'shaming' and this can provide leverage to make them respect their citizens' rights
• Gross violations of human rights, such as torture, are clearly criminal
• Other acts, such as economic exploitation, are not self-evidently criminal, even if we find them morally unacceptable
• There are disagreements about what counts as a human right
• The Authoritarian Personality

  Adorno et al (1950) identify an authoritarian personality that includes a willingness to obey the order of superiors without question.

  They argue that at the time of the Second World War, many Germans had authoritarian personality types due to the disciplinarian socialisation patterns that were common at the time.
• Crimes Of Obedience


  •Research suggests that there is little psychological difference between those who carry out crimes such as torture and ‘normal’ people.•Sociologists argue that such actions are part of a role into which individuals are socialised.• They focus on the social conditions in which such behaviour becomes acceptable or even required.
• Authoritarian Personality


  Concept studied by Kelman and Hamilton (1989) to explain "crimes of obedience"
• Crimes of obedience

  • Massacre of 400 civilians by American soldiers at My Lai in Vietnam
• Other Explan

  Bauman (1989) argues that it was certain features of modern society that made the Holocaust possible:

  •A division of labour – each person was responsible for one small task, so no-one felt personally responsible for the atrocity.•Bureaucratisation – normalised the killing by making it a repetitive and routine job.•Science and technology – research into chemical weapons sped up the task of killing.
• Features that produce crimes of obedience

  • Authorisation - when acts are ordered by those in authority, normal moral principles are replaced by the duty to obey
  • Routinisation - once the crime has been committed, there is strong pressure to turn the act into routine which individuals can perform in a detached manner
  • Dehumanisation - when the enemy is portrayed as subhuman rather than human and described as animals, monsters etc, the usual principles of morality do not apply
• Eval


  •Not all state crimes are carried out by a highly organised division of labour – the Rwandan genocide was carried out mainly by marauding groups.•Although modern technology facilitated the means to carry out the holocaust, it was racist ideology (hardly a new invention) that motivated it.
• Eval

  State crime is often the type of crime with the most severe impact on human lives, so it is an extremely relevant and important field of study.

  Transgressive criminologists who looks at harms/human rights abuses rather than only violations of the law provide a useful view

  Theories provide useful insights into historical state crimes like the Holocaust or My Lai massacre, and more recent atrocities like chemical weapons attacks in Syria.
• Limitations

  •it is difficult to know the true extent of state crime given the state’s power to cover up and deny their actions. There are no valid official statistics and the ‘dark figure’ of state crime is probably much higher than for other types of crime.•In dictatorships, researchers risk imprisonment, torture and death as enemies of the state, therefore research is limited•They are often reliant on secondary data like the media, but these tend to focus on non-Western countries rather than state crimes committed by Western democracies.