State Crime

• Green and Ward

  Define state crime as “illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by or with the complicity of state agencies”

  • Can include genocide, war crimes, torture, imprisonment without trial and assassination
  • Crime that are committed by or on behalf of states and governments in order to further their policies
  • State crime is one of the worst crimes due to:
  • The sheer scale of the state crime - Pol Pot in Cambodia is estimated to have killed 1/5 of the countries population
  • The state is a source of law - The state power allows them to conceal its crime
• McLaughlin

  Identifies 4 categories of state crime:

  • Political crimes: Corruption or censorship
  • Crimes by security: Genocide, torture and safety laws
  • Economic crimes: Violation of health and safety laws
  • Social and Cultural crimes: Instutuional racism
• Kramer and Michalowski

  • State initiated - when state initiated, direct or approve corporate crimes. Example: when the state agency NASA made risky and cost cutting decisions with the launch of the space shuttle, which led to an explosion that killed 7 astronauts
  • State facilitated - When state fails to regulate and control corporate crime / behaviour, making the crime easier. Example: BP oil spill, found government had failed to regulate the industry adequately
• 2 types of war crimes

  • Illegal wars: War can only be declared by the UN Security Council (unless self defence). The Iraq war (a ’war on terror‘) as illegal. Yet Kramer and Michalowski there were weapons of mass destruction so the war was self defence .
  • Crimes committed during war or its aftermath - For example when the US illegally changed the iraq constitution so that the economy could be privatised. Also the use of torture of prisoners followed the Iraq war.
• Defining state crime

  Social harms and zemiology

  Hillyard et al

  • We should take a much wider view of state wrong doing.
  • Replace the study of crimes with “Zemiology’ - the study of harms, whether or not they are against the law.
  • This could create a single standard that can be applied to different states and prevents states just creating laws that justify their behaviours.
  • However critics point out that the ‘harms’ definition is vague - what level of harm must occur before an ext is defined as a crime? Who decides what counts as a harm?
• Defining State Crime

  Labelling Theory

  • Whether an act constitutes a crime depends on whether the social audience for that act defines it as a crime.
  • Definition recognises that the state crime is socially constructed - so what people define as a state crime can vary overtime and between cultures or groups.
  • Yet can be criticised as unclear - who is supposed to be the relevant audience, who decides whether state crime has been committed. Ruling class ideology may manipulate this.
• Defining State Crime

  International Law

  • Based definition of state crime on international law
  • Law created through treaties such as the Geneva and Hague Conventions on war crime.
• Defining State Crime

  Human Rights Definition

  Herman and Julia Schwendinger

  • Define crime in terms of the violation of human rights rather than the breaking of rules.
  • Human rights are defined as natural rights that people have by virtue of existing. E.G liberty or as civil rights, such as the right to vote.
  • The view is if a state practices racism or sexism or economically exploited citizens it is violating human rights and should be guilty of a crime.
• Explaining State Crime

  The Authoritarian Personality

  Adorno et al

  • An authoritarian personality that includes a willingness to obey the orders of superiors without question.
  • Argue that the time of the Second World War, many Germans has authoritarian personality types due to the punitive, disciplinarian socialisation patterns that were common at the time.
• Explaining State Crime

  Crimes of Obedience

  • State crimes are crimes of conformity.
  • Research suggests that many people are willing to obey authority, even when harming others (Milgrams research)
  • Sociologists argue that obedience occurs due to wider social conditions.
  • Green and Ward argue that to overcome norms against the use of cruelty, individuals who become tortures need to be re-socialised and exposed to propaganda about the enemy.
• Explaining State Crime

  Crimes of Obedience

  • Social psychologists have explained crimes of ‘obedience’ such as the holocaust or My Lai (where 400 were massacred by American soldiers in Vietnam). As a result of socialisation and social processes where such behaviour becomes acceptable.

  Kelmam and Hamilton identify 3 features that produce crimes of obedience:

  • Authorisation - When acts are ordered or approved
  • Routinisation - Turning a criminal act into routine that the individuals perform in a detached manner.
  • Dehumanisation - Where the enemy is portrayed as sub human.
• Explaining State Crime

  Modernity

  Bauman

  • Argues that social conditions which produced the holocaust included many feature of modern society - a developed division of labour, where no person felt responsible for the entire atrocity.
  • Normalising the killing by making is a repetitive, routine job and instrumental rationality - where rational, efficient methods are used to achieve a goal, as well as developed science and technology.
  • To understand the holocaust one must understand the ability of modern society to turn to mass murder into a routine administrative task.
• Explaining State Crime

  The Culture of Denial

  Cohen

  • State now have to make greater effort to conceal or justify their human rights crimes or to relabel them as not being crimes.
  • State follows a 3 stage of ‘spiral of state denial’ - it didn’t happen, if it did happen it’s something else and even if it is what you say it is, it’s justified.