Key Theorists - Globalisation, Green Crime, Human Rights and State Crime

Question 1

Key Theorist – Castells (1998): Crime and Globalisation

WHAT DID THIS THEORIST ARGUE?

Answer 1

• As a result of globalisation, there is now a global criminal economy worth over £1 trillion per year.

Question 2

Key Theorist – Castells (1998): Crime and Globalisation

WHAT TYPES OF CRIMES DOES THIS THEORIST ARGUE MAKE UP THE GLOBAL CRIMINAL ECONOMY?
GIVE AT LEAST TWO EXAMPLES.

Answer 2

At least two from:

• Arms trafficking to illegal regimes, guerrilla groups and terrorists.
• Trafficking in nuclear materials, especially from the former communist countries.
• Smuggling of illegal immigrants, for example, the Chinese triads make an estimated 2.5 billion dollars annually.
• Trafficking in women or children, often linked to prostitution or slavery. Up to half a million people are trafficked to Western Europe annually.
• Sex tourism, where westerners travel to third world countries for sex, sometimes involving minors.
• Trafficking in body parts for organ transplants in rich countries. An estimated 2000 organs annually are taken from condemned or executed criminals in China.

Question 3

Key Theorist – Taylor (1997): Globalisation, Capitalism and Crime

WHAT DOES THIS THEORIST ARGUE ABOUT GLOBALISATION?

Answer 3

It has:
- Led to changes in the pattern and extent of crime. By giving free rein to market forces, globalisation has created greater inequality and rising crime.
- Created crime at both ends of the social spectrum. It has allowed transnational corporations to switch manufacturing to low wage countries, producing job insecurity, unemployment and poverty. creates criminal opportunities on a grand scale for elite groups. For example, the deregulation of financial markets has created opportunities for insider trading and the movement of funds around the globe to avoid taxation.
Led to new patterns of employment which created new opportunities for crime.
- Led to the increased use of sub-contracting to recruit flexible workers, often working illegally or employed for less than the minimum wage or working in breach of health and safety laws or labour laws.

Question 4

Key Theorist – Taylor (1997): Globalisation, Capitalism and Crime

WHAT DOES THIS THEORIST ARGUE ABOUT DEREGULATION?

Answer 4

• It means that governments have little control over their own economies, for example, to create jobs or raise taxes, while state spending on welfare has declined.

Question 5

Key Theorist – Taylor (1997): Globalisation, Capitalism and Crime

WHAT DOES THIS THEORIST ARGUE ABOUT MARKETISATION?

Answer 5

• Marketisation has encouraged people to see themselves as individual consumers, calculating the personal costs and benefits of each action. This undermines social cohesion.

Question 6

Key Theorist – Taylor (1997): Globalisation, Capitalism and Crime

WHAT DOES THIS THEORIST ARGUE IN TERMS OF LEFT REALISM?

Answer 6

• They note that the increasingly materialistic culture promoted by the global media, portrays success in terms of a lifestyle of consumption.

Question 7

Key Theorist – Taylor (1997): Globalisation, Capitalism and Crime

WHAT DOES THIS THEORIST ARGUE ABOUT ALL THE FACTORS THEY IDENTIFY?

Answer 7

• They create insecurity and widening inequalities that encourage people, especially the poor, to turn to crime. The lack of legitimate job opportunities destroys self-respect and drives the unemployed to look for illegitimate opportunities.

Question 8

Key Theorist – Taylor (1997): Globalisation, Capitalism and Crime

HOW CAN THIS THEORY BE EVALUATED POSITIVELY?

Answer 8

• It is useful in linking global trends in the capitalist economy to changes in the pattern of crime.

Question 9

Key Theorist – Taylor (1997): Globalisation, Capitalism and Crime

HOW CAN THIS THEORY BE EVALUATED NEGATIVELY?

Answer 9

• It does not adequately explain how the changes make people behave in criminal ways. For example, not all poor people turn to crime.

Question 10

Key Theorists – Rothe and Friedrichs (2015): Crimes of Globalisation

WHAT DO THEY EXAMINE?

Answer 10

• The role of International financial organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in what they call ‘crimes of globalisation’. These organisations are dominated by major capitalist states.

Question 11

Key Theorists – Rothe and Friedrichs (2015): Crimes of Globalisation

WHAT DO THEY ARGUE?

Answer 11

• These bodies impose procapitalist, neoliberal economic ‘structural adjustment programmes’ on poor countries as a condition for the loans they provide. These programmes often require governments to cut spending on health and education, and to privatise publicly owned services (such as water supply), industries and natural resources.
• While this Western corporations to expand into these countries, it creates conditions for crime.

Question 12

Key Theorists – Hobbs and Dunningham: Patterns of Criminal Organisation

WHAT DID THEY FIND?

Answer 12

• The way crime is organised is linked to the economic changes brought by globalisation.
• Increasingly, it involves individuals with contacts acting as a ‘hub’ around which a loose knit network forms, composed of other individuals seeking opportunities, and often linking legitimate and illegitimate activities.

Question 13

Key Theorists – Hobbs and Dunningham: Patterns of Criminal Organisation

WHAT DO THEY ARGUE?

Answer 13

• Changes associated with globalisation has led to changes in patterns of crime. For example, the shift from old rigidly hierarchal gang structure to lose networks of flexible, opportunistic, entrepreneurial criminals.

Question 14

Key Theorists – Hobbs and Dunningham: Patterns of Criminal Organisation

WHAT DO THEY CONCLUDE?

Answer 14

• Crime works on a ‘glocal’ system. This means that crime is still locally based, but with global connections. This means that the form it takes will vary from place to place, according to local conditions, even if it is influenced by global factors such as the availability of drugs from abroad.

Question 15

Key Theorists – Hobbs and Dunningham: Patterns of Criminal Organisation

HOW CAN THIS THEORY BE EVALUATED?
GIVE AT LEAST ONE EXAMPLE.

Answer 15

At least one from:

• It is not clear that such patterns are new, nor that the older structures have disappeared. It may just be that the two have coexisted.
• Equally, their conclusions may not be generalizable to other criminal activities elsewhere.

Question 16

Key Theorist – Glenny (2008): McMafia

COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE(S):

Another example of the ______ between criminal organisation and globalisation is what Glenny calls ‘McMafia’. This refers to the _______ that emerged in ______ and Eastern Europe following the fall of _______ – it’s self a major _______ in the process of globalisation. Glenny traces is the origins of transnational organised crime to the ______ of the Soviet Union after 1989, which coincided with the ______ of global markets.

Answer 16

• Relationship
• Organisations
• Russia
• Communism
• Factor
• Breakup
• Deregulation

Question 17

Key Theorist – Glenny (2008): McMafia

COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE(S):

• Under ______, the Soviet state had a ______ the prices of everything. However, following the fall of communism, the Russian ______ deregulated most sectors of the _____ except natural resources such as oil. These ______ remained at the old Soviet prices – often only a fortieth of the world market price. Anyone with access to funds, such as former Communist officials and KGB (secret service) generals could buy up oil, gas, diamonds or metals for next to nothing. Selling them abroad as an _____ profit, these individuals became Russia’s new capitalist class.

Answer 17

• Communism
• Regulated
• Government
• Economy
• Commodities
• Astronomical

Question 18

Key Theorist – Glenny (2008): McMafia

COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE(S):

The collapse of the Communist ____ heralded a period of _____ disorder. To protect their _____ capitalists therefore turned to the ‘mafias’ that had begun to spring up.

Answer 18

• State
• Increasing
• Wealth

Question 19

Key Theorists – Green and Ward (2012): State Crimes

WHAT DO THEY ARGUE?

Answer 19

• State crime is: ‘illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by, or with the complicity of, state agencies’.

Question 20

Eugene McLaughlin (2012): State Crime

WHAT CATEGORIES OF STATE CRIME DOES THIS THEORIST IDENTIFY?

Answer 20

• Political crimes: for example, corruption and censorship.
• Crimes by security and police forces such as genocide, torture and disappearances of dissidents (someone who opposes official policy).
• Economic crimes: for example official violations of health and safety laws.
• Social and cultural crimes such as institutional racism.

Question 21

Key Theorist – Straus (2015, 2016): Genocide in Rwanda

WHAT DID THIS THEORY FIND?

Answer 21

• In 1994, Rwanda was the scene of ‘the 20th century’s fastest genocide’.

Question 22

Key Theorists – Kramer and Michalowski (1993): State-Corporate Crime

WHAT DO THEY DISTINGUISH BETWEEN?

Answer 22

‘state initiated’ and ‘state facilitated’ corporate crime:

• The Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986 is an example of state initiated corporate crime. This occurs when states initiate, direct or approve corporate crimes. In the case of Challenger, risky, negligent and cost-cutting decisions by the state agency NASA and the corporation Morton Thiokol led to an explosion that killed seven astronauts 73 seconds after blast-off.
• The Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 is an example of state facilitated corporate crime. This occurs when states failed to regulate and control corporate behaviour making, crime easier. The rig, leased by BP, exploded and sank, killing 11 workers and causing the largest accidental oil spill in history, with major health, environmental and economic impacts. The official enquiry found that while the disaster resulted from decisions by the companies involved (BP, Haliburton and Transocean), Government regulators had failed to oversee the industry adequately or notice the companies’ cost cutting decisions.

Question 23

Key Theorists - Kramer and Michalowski (2005): War Crimes

WHAT DO THEY ARGUE ABOUT WAR CRIMES?

Answer 23

• To justify their invasion of Iraq in 2003 as self-defence, the USA and UK knowingly made the false claim that the Iraqis possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Question 24

Key Theorist – Whyte (2014): War Crimes

WHAT DOES THIS THEORY DESCRIBE?

Answer 24

• The USA’s ‘neoliberal colonisation’ of Iraq, in which the constitution was illegally changed so that the economy could be privatised. Iraqi oil revenues were ceased to pay for ‘reconstruction’. In 2004 alone, over $48 billion went to US firms. Poor oversight by the occupying powers meant it is unclear where much of this went, and cost-plus contracts where all the contractor’s costs are met automatically by the government, regardless of what they are for) led to enormous waste. This case is also an example of state corporate crime.

Question 25

Key Theorists - Kramer and Michalowski: War Crimes

WHAT DOES THIS THEORY IDENTIFY?

Answer 25

• Other crimes committed during the Iraq war, including torture of prisoners. For example, a US military enquiry into Abu Ghraib prison found numerous incidences of ‘sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses’ of prisoners. Nine soldiers were convicted, the highest ranking being a staff sergeant. No commanding officers were prosecuted. Personnel from private companies were also implicated but none were prosecuted.

Question 26

Key Theorist – Kramer (2014): War Crimes

WHAT DOES THIS THEORIST NOTE?

Answer 26

• How the terror bombing of civilians has become ‘normalised’. This began in the 1930s and continued through the Second World War with the American firebombing of 67 Japanese cities and atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No trials for war crimes took place. Indiscriminate and often deliberate bombings of civilians has continued in recent conflicts in Iraq and Syria.

Question 27

Key Theorist – Chambliss (1989): Defining State Crime

WHAT DOES THIS THEORIST DEFINE STATE CRIME AS?

Answer 27

• ‘Acts defined by the law as criminal and committed by state officials in pursuit of their jobs as representatives of the state’.

Question 28

Key Theorist – Chambliss (1989): Defining State Crime

HOW CAN THIS THEORY BE EVALUATED?
GIVE AT LEAST ONE EXAMPLE.

Answer 28

At least one from:

• Using a state owned domestic law to define state crime is in adequate. It is ignores the fact that states have the power to make laws and so they can avoid criminalising their own actions. Furthermore they can make laws allowing them to carry out harmful acts. For example the German Nazi State passed a law permitting it to compulsorily sterilise disabled people.
• This definition also lead to inconsistencies. For example the same act may be illegal on one side of the border but not on the other.

Question 29

Key Theorist – Michalowski (1985): Defining State Crime

HOW DOES THIS THEORIST DEFINE STATE CRIME?

Answer 29

• As including not just illegal acts, but also legally permissible acts whose consequences are similar to those of illegal acts in the harm they cause.

Question 30

Key Theorist – Hillyard et al (2004): Defining State Crime

WHAT DOES THIS THEORIST ARGUE?

Answer 30

• That we should take a much wider view of state wrongdoing.
• We should replace the study of crimes with ‘zemiology’ – the study of harms, whether or not they are against the law. For example these harms would include state facilitated poverty.

Question 31

Key Theorist – Hillyard et al (2004): Defining State Crime

HOW CAN THIS THEORY BE EVALUATED?
GIVE AT LEAST ONE EXAMPLE.

Answer 31

• This definition prevents the state from ruling themselves’ out of court by making laws that allow them to misbehave. It also creates a single standard that can be applied to different states to identify which ones are most harmful to human or environmental well-being.
• However, critics argue that a harms definition is potentially very vague. What level of harm must occur before an act is defined as a crime? There is a danger that it makes the field of study too wide. Who decides what counts as a harm? This just replaces the state’s arbitrary definition of crime with the sociologist’s equally arbitrary definition of harm.

Question 32

Key Theorists – Rothe and Mullins: Defining State Crime

HOW DOES THIS THEORY DEFINE STATE CRIME?

Answer 32

• Any action by or on behalf of a state that violates international law and/or a state’s own domestic law.

Question 33

Key Theorists – Rothe and Mullins: Defining State Crime

HOW CAN THIS THEORY BE EVALUATED?

Answer 33

• The advantage of this is that it does not depend on the sociologist’s own personal definition of harm or who the relevant social audience is. Instead it uses globally agreed definitions of state crime. International law also has the advantage of being internationally designed to deal with state crime, unlike most domestic law.
• However, like the laws made by individual states, international law is a social construction involving the use of power.
• Another limitation is that international law largely focuses on war crimes and crimes against humanity, rather than other state crimes such as corruption.

Question 34

Key Theorists – Herman and Julia Schwendinger: Defining State Crime

WHAT DO THEY ARGUE?

Answer 34

• We should define state crime as the violation of people’s basic human rights by the state or its agents.
• States that practice imperialism, racism, sexism or economic exploitation are committing crimes because they are denying people of their basic rights.

Question 35

Key Theorist – Adorno et al: Explaining State Crime

WHAT DO THEY IDENTIFY?

Answer 35

• An ‘authoritarian personality’ that includes a willingness to obey the orders of superiors without question.

Question 36

Key Theorist – Adorno et al: Explaining State Crime

WHAT DO THEY ARGUE?

Answer 36

• That at the time of the Second World War, many Germans had an authoritarian personality type due to punitive, disciplinarian socialisation patterns that were common at the time.
• Similarly, it is often thought that people who carry out torture and genocide must be psychopaths. However, research suggests that there is little psychological difference between them and ‘normal’ people.

Question 37

Key Theorists – Green and Ward: Explaining State Crime

WHAT DO THEY ARGUE?

Answer 37

• In order to overcome norms against the use of cruelty, individuals who become torturers often need to be re-socialised, trained and exposed to propaganda about ‘the enemy’.
• States also frequently create ‘enclaves of barbarism’ where torture is practised, such as military bases, segregated from outside society. This allows the torturer to regard it has a ‘9-to-5 job’ which he can return to everyday life.

Question 38

Key Theorists – Kelman and Hamilton (1989): Explaining State Crime

WHAT DID THEY IDENTIFY?

Answer 38

Three general features that produce crimes of obdience:

1) Authorisation – when acts are ordered or approved by those in authority, normal moral principles are replaced by the duty to obey.
2) Routinisation – once the crime has been committed, there is a strong pressure to turn the act into a routine that individuals can perform in a detached manner.
3) Dehumanisation – when the enemy is portrayed as subhuman, normal principles of morality do not apply.

Question 39

Key Theorist – Bauman (1989): Explaining State Crime

WHAT DOES THIS THEORIST ARGUE?

Answer 39

• It was certain key features of modern society that made the Holocaust possible.
• The Holocaust was a modern, industrialised mass production ‘factory’ system, where the product was mass murder.
• The Holocaust was the result not of a breakdown of civilisation, but of the very existence of modern rational bureaucratic civilisation.

Question 40

Key Theorist – Bauman (1989): Explaining State Crime

WHAT ARE THE FEATURES OF MODERNITY THAT MADE THE HOLOCAUST POSSIBLE?

Answer 40

1. A division of labour – each person was responsible for one small task, so no one felt personal responsibility for the atrocity.
2. Bureaucratisation – this normalised the killing by making it a repetitive, rule-governed and routine ‘job’. It also meant that the victims could be dehumanised as a mere unit.
3. Instrumental rationality – where rational, efficient methods are used to achieve a goal, regardless of what the goal is. In modern business, the goal is to make profit; in the Holocaust, it was murder.
4. Science and technology – from the railways transporting victims to the death camps, to the industrially produced gas used to kill them.

Question 41

Key Theorist – Beck (1992): Green Crime (‘Global Risk Society’ and the Environment)

WHAT DOES BECKER ARGUE?

Answer 41

• In today’s late modern society we can now provide adequate resources for all (at least in developed countries).
• However, the massive increase in productivity and technology that sustains it have created new ‘manufactured risks’ – dangers that we have never faced before.
• Many of these risks involve harm to the environment and its consequences for humanity, such as global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions from industry. Like climate change, many of these risks are global rather than local in nature, leading Beck to describe the late modern society as a ‘global risk society’.

Question 42

Key Theorists – Situ and Emmons (2000): Defining Green Crime

WHAT DO THEY DEFINE ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME AS?

Answer 42

• ‘An unauthorised act or omission that violates the law’.

Question 43

Key Theorist – White (2008): Defining Green Crime

WHAT DOES THIS THEORIST ARGUE?

Answer 43

• The proper subject of criminology is any action that harms the physical environment and/or the human and nonhuman animals within it, even if no law has been broken.

Question 44

Key Theorist – South (2014): Primary Green Crimes

WHAT TYPES OF PRIMARY CRIME DOES THIS THEORIST IDENTIFY?

Answer 44

1) Crimes of air pollution.
2) Crimes of deforestation.
3) Crimes of species decline and animal abuse.
4) Crimes of water pollution.

Question 45

Key Theorist – South (2014): Primary Green Crimes

COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES ON CRIMES OF AIR POLLUTION:

Burning fossil ______ from industry and transport at 6 ______ tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year and carbon emissions are ______ at around 2% per annum, contributing to global ______. The potential ______ are governments, business and consumers.

Answer 45

• Fuels
• Billion
• Growing
• Warming
• Criminals

Question 46

Key Theorist – South (2014): Primary Green Crimes

COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES ON CRIMES OF DEFORESTATION:

Between 1960 and 1990, 1/5 of the world’s tropical rainforest was _______, for example through illegal logging. In the Amazon, forest has been cleared to rear beef cattle for export.

Answer 46

• Destroyed

Question 47

Key Theorist – South (2014): Primary Green Crimes

COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES ON CRIMES OF SPECIES DECLINE AND ANIMAL ABUSE:

50 species a day are becoming ______, and 46% of mammals and 11% of bird species are at risk. 70 to 95% of earth’s species live in the rainforest, which are under _____ threat. There is trafficking in animals and animal parts. Meanwhile, old crimes such as dogfights and badger baiting are on the _____.

Answer 47

• Extinct
• Severe
• Increase

Question 48

Key Theorist – South (2014): Primary Green Crimes

COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES ON CRIMES OF WATER POLLUTION:

Half a billion people _____ access to clean drinking water and around 25 million people die annually from drinking water which is _______. Rain pollution threatens 58% of the world’s ocean race and 34% of its fish. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill caused massive harm to marine life and costs. Criminals include businesses that dump toxic waste and governments that discharge untreated sewage into rivers and seas.

Answer 48

• Lack

- Contaminated

Question 49

Key Theorist – South (2014): Secondary Green Crimes

WHAT TYPES OF SECONDARY GREEN CRIME DOES THIS THEORIST SUGGEST?

Answer 49

• State violence against oppositional groups.

- Hazardous waste and organised crime.