Human rights and state crime

Question 1

What is state crime?

Answer 1

state crime is illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by state agencies
-state agencies are armed forces, secret service, civil servants, police, prison service etc

state crime can include - genocide, war crimes, torture, assassination, invasion of countries with less power, imprisonment without trial
e.g assassination of JFK
Invasion of countries with less power = Nazi germany

Question 2

Modernity has increased level and types of state crime (bauman)

Answer 2

• science, technology and the impact of globalisation has given rise to state crime and violation of human rights
  -e.g holocaust explains how modernity and science impact on this large scale state crime
  -weapons and technology were made to invade and attack

Question 3

State forces others to commit crimes (kelman and hamilton)

Answer 3

• tells us how torture happens in prison/war crimes
  -identify 3 features that produce crimes of obedience
  - authorisation — when those with a higher power can order you to carry out a act that violates human rights
  - routinisation — when a crime has been committed once then it makes it easier to do it again
  - dehuminisation — if the person you are committing the violation of human rights against has been painted as a monster
• all of these allow people in power the right to instruct and violate human rights and those in power are not directly doing the crime which essentially pushes the blame

Question 4

Human rights (schwendinger)

Answer 4

• idea that we should change the definition of crime to one that talks about the violation of human rights instead of breaking legal values
  
  • any state that allows discrimination based on any aspect of being a human is violating human rights (state as a perpetrator)
    -if people are willing to accept what the states legal definition of crime is then no one will question it (subservience to the state)
  • state crime goes beyond the traditional definition of crime and the law (transgressive criminology)

evaluation - human rights can be subjective e.g what do we mean by human rights? does it differ from person to person? does it differ from country to country?

Question 5

The spiral of denial - cohen

Answer 5

stage 1) claim it did not happen
stage 2) claim that if it did happen then it was not a crime but an act of self defence
stage 3) claim that it can be justified

states denying that crimes being committed can lead to a deregulation of laws
- globalisation causes more complexity finding the offender as there is more interconnection and countries work together to commit said crimes

Question 6

Neutralisation theory (sykes and matza)

Answer 6

Cohen draws on the works of sykes and matza who identify five neutralisation techniques that delinquents use to justify their deviant behaviour - cohen applies it to how the states use the same techniques to justify human rights violations such as tortures and massacres
- denial of victim
- denial of injury
- denial of responsibility
- condemning the condemners
- appeal to higher loyalty
these seek to deny that the event has occurred or change the story

also mention traditional marxist view