Crime and Deviance: State Crime and Human Rights: Flashcards
What is state crime?
Green and Ward (2005) define state crime as ‘illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by the state, or with the complicity of state agencies’.
What is one similarity between 9/11 and Hiroshima?
Both acts of war.
What is one difference between 9/11 and Hiroshima?
Hiroshima was approved by the state and authorized.
What is the biggest state crime, arguably, right now that is occuring?
Uighurs being locked away in detention/ ‘re-education’ camps by China’s government.
Give some examples of state crimes:
- Genocide.
- Torture.
- Assassination.
- Imprisonment without trial.
Give a case study example of ‘imprisonment without trial’:
Guantanamo Bay.
Why should state crimes be considered the most serious of all crimes?
- The power of the state makes large-scale crime possible.
- They are able to hide crimes and escape punishment.
- The state is the source of the law
- It is hard for foreign countries to intervene in the UN, because of the state sovereignty and national boundaries.
What are human rights? Give an example:
Human rights are moral principles or norms that describe certain standards of human behaviour and are regularly protected as natural and legal rights in municipal and international law.
For example - an adequate standard of living.
What did Schwendinger and Schwendinger argue about crime?
That in order to make state crime more prosecutable we need to adopt a transgressive approach.
Why is state crime hard to research?
State secrecy - states deny or justify actions or reclassify them as something else. State crimes are carried out by powerful people who have huge armoury of state agencies to control information and cover up state criminal activity.
Cultural bias - researchers are more reliant on secondary data life media reports but even these tend to focus on state crimes in developing countries,
Threats - likely to face strong official resistance e.g. a nation can deny access to official documents.
Why do we need to consider the UN declaration of human rights when we discuss state crime?
States have the ability to define what constitutes a crime so many are exploitation of human rights but not legislatively illegitate.
What are some examples of state crimes?
- Nazi Germany regime (genocide).
- Grenfell tower fire.
- Guantanamo Bay.
What are the subtopics of common state crimes?
- War crimes.
- Torture.
- State sponsored terrorism.
- Genocide.
What is the transgressive approach?
Defining something as criminal by the amount of human harm it causes.
