Crime and Deviance - State crime

Question 1

Types of state crime

Answer 1

• Treason
• Espionage
• Human rights violation
• Corruption
• Illegal drugs
• Genocide
• Not paying minimum wage

Question 2

The climate of state crime / requirements for state crime

Answer 2

• Election rigging - giving an electoral mandate to introduce the laws they want / give them the majorities to pass human rights violations etc
• Infrastructure - unstable, possibly some involvement with criminal gangs
• Resources - vast amounts of money to pay for people and items
• Power and control - ideological and physical, military - hiding things from the media, no accountability
• Control over the security force
• Control over the media
• The ability to define what is legal and illegal
• The ability to cover up their actions
• The ability to create fear amongst the masses and those who could challenge them
• Relationships with other governments who will support you (often costs something in return)
• Money
• A disregard for the rights of some / all of your population - marginalised groups
• A sense of greed and entitlement

Question 3

Definitions of state crime

Answer 3

• Crime = socially constructed, we disagree nation to nation on what a crime is and so it is difficult to identify and intervene in other states
• Zemiological approach - what causes harm should be the basis of what is considered to be criminal (but it imposes one set of values on others)
• Transgressive approach - if it harms humans rights then it is a crime; if it transgresses freedom etc
• McLaughlin (2001) - 4 types of state crime
• Green and Ward (2005) - illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by the state, or with the complicity of state agencies - state crimes are committed by, or on behalf of, nation states in order to achieve their policies

Question 4

Causes of state crime

Answer 4

• Adorno - citizens are persuaded to support crime by an authoritarian leader (Milgram)
• Kelman and Hamilton - crimes of obedience - found 3 aspects; authorisation (being told you must/can do it), routinisation (normalisation because it is done often), dehumanisation (making the victims seem sub-human to justify the harm)
• Cohen - culture of denial
• Sykes and Matza - techniques of neutralisation
• Integrated theory - all crimes need means, motive and opportunity along with a failure of control

Question 5

Who can commit state crime?

Answer 5

• Anyone working for the state who engaged in illegal activities in order to achieve state policies; politicians, civil servants etc
• The state is what the government runs (government is the crew, the state is the ship) so this means any politician or civil servant doing anything deviant or illegal to pursue national policies in any sphere, be it health care, social welfare, education, military engagements or crime control itself
• The inclusion of state agencies means it is not just politicians or civil servants who can commit state crime, it is also public sector workers such as the armed forces or the police, or doctors, teachers, anyone who does anything illegal when working in an official context to achieve government policy

Question 6

Cohen - culture of denial

Answer 6

1) Stage 1 - the event did not happen (often disproved by charities, victims, media)
2) Stage 2 - the event was necessary / accidental / not as people perceive it
3) Stage 3 - the event was justified to prevent greater harm and this uses techniques of neutralisation given by Sykes and Matza

Question 7

Sykes and Matza - Techniques of neutralisation

Answer 7

States use the following techniques when attempting to justify human rights violation; they dress up excuses as justifications:
1) Denial of victim (they exaggerate they are used to violence)
2) Denial of injury (they started it, we are the victim, nothing bad happened)
3) Denial of responsibility (I was just obeying orders)
4) Condemning of the condemners (it is worse elsewhere)
5) Appealing to higher loyalty (the self righteous justification, the appeal to a higher cause, whether the nation or revolution)

Question 8

McLaughlin - Types of state crime

Answer 8

1) Economic crimes
-> President Mubarak (former Egyptian president) had accumulated a wealth of $70 billion in 2011

2) Political crimes
-> Rummel (2012) estimated that 262 million people were killed by forms of state action in 20th century
-> Corruption
-> Censorship

3) Social and cultural crimes
-> Institutional racism
-> Jewish persecution by Hitler

4) Crimes committed by the state or police
-> Amnesty International found that a minimum of 111 countries practised torture and ill treatment in 2009
-> During the Iraq war, US soldiers tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison

Question 9

Capitalism and global crime

Answer 9

• Taylor - sociologist criminologist
• Capitalist - main driver of globalisation of crime (criminogenic)
  1) Rich people can move money efficiently and effectively - financial crime
  2) Rich people do not want to enforce laws over tax havens - easier for organised gangs to exploit loopholes
  3) Companies want to maximise profits - they move their business to low wage deprived countries, and loss of employment in the West leads to increased crime / disorder and companies cutting corners and committing crime in low-income countries

Ruggiero (1996) - some companies go further in the search for massive profits - they seek out illegal immigrant labour as it is cheap and unregulated

Question 10

Dependency theory

Answer 10

• From a dependency perspective, state crime against the powerless is a systematic part of development, as it is the means by which rich countries make themselves rich at the expense of poor ones, and rich people in both rich and poor countries, make themselves rich as the expense of the powerless
• The rich countries depend on their ability to commit crime at the expense of the poorer ones e.g. colonialism, slavery, cheap immigrant labour
• Rich countries permit developing countries / other nations to engage in state crimes where they are also serving an interest (e.g. treatment of women in Saudi Arabia was not challenged by the US)

Question 11

Sex trafficking as a global crime

Answer 11

• Hughes - sex trafficking in countries where it is legal has the issue of renaming those are sex trafficked as sex workers, which distracts from the problems of abuse and coercion - the money provided by the industry of sex tourism, e.g. where is is a billion-dollar industry in the Netherlands and $200,000 industry in the Czech Republic - the defining of it ignores the crime of exploitation in the name of money, and ignores how countries conspire to ‘send’ prostitutes from low income places where they are recruited due to poverty, to high income places where their services are sold
• False images and narratives are created to hide the abuse of sex trafficking under the premise of a better life for those trafficked
• Links to safety valve of crime under Davis - sex trafficking cannot be deemed to be a safety valve crime to release the pressure of society; this exploitation is not functional and is not a small act of deviance; legal prostitutes maybe a small act of deviance, but the reality of the industry contradicts this