State Crime

Question 1

What are the two types of state crimes?

Answer 1

Traditional and transgressive

Question 2

What’s traditional state crime?

Answer 2

Illegal or deviant acts that are perpetrated by or with the complicity of the state. It includes genocide, war crimes, torture, imprisonment without trial and assination

Question 3

What’s transgressive state crime?

Answer 3

Cohen argues that the defonition of crime should involve both crimes and human rights violations commited by the state. These may be things that have broken their own or international law

Question 4

What does McLoughlin identify as the 4 categories of state crime?

Answer 4

1. Political crimes such as censorship and corruption. 2. Crimes by security and the police eg genocide, torture and the dissaperance of individuals. Economic crimes eg the violation of health and safety laws. 4. Social and cultural crimes such as institutional racism.

Question 5

What is an example of torture and mass punishment of citizens?

Answer 5

In 2012 the UKS military of defence paid £14 million to Iraquis illegally detained during the Iraq invasion

Question 6

What is an example of state corruption?

Answer 6

Sani Abacha was a Nigerian army officer and dictator who was revealed after his death to have stolen $3-5 billion of public money

Question 7

What are two example of state assination or targeted killing?

Answer 7

The sailsbury poisonings in 2018 and the assination of Kim Jong Nam by North Korea in 2017

Question 8

What is an example of state war crimes?

Answer 8

The Israeli Palestine war

Question 9

What’s an example of Genocide?

Answer 9

the Serbenia genocide which happened even while UN soldiers were there

Question 10

What’s an example of a state crime in Russia?

Answer 10

The propaganda against homosexual people.

Question 11

Who came up with the idea of transgressive criminology?

Answer 11

Herman and Julia Schwendinger

Question 12

What is transgressive criminology?

Answer 12

Herman and Julia Schwendingers argument that we should define crime in the terms of violation of human rights rather than the breaking of rules. If a state practices racism or sexism or economically exploits its citizens it is violating human rights and should be guilty of a crime. Sociology should defend human rights.

Question 13

What arguably supports transgressive criminology?

Answer 13

The Nazis made it legal to persecute Jews, if just looking in traditional legal terms this would have made it okay when it obviously was not.

Question 14

What is a critism of transgressive criminology?

Answer 14

Our views and morals are always going to change with time, therefore it’s upto debate who gets too decide what is morally right and what is not.

Question 15

When was the declaration of human rights?

Answer 15

1948

Question 16

What does O’Bryne argue?

Answer 16

The state are increasingly assessed by the extent to which they preserve human rights and by the extent of which the fail to do so through injustice, discrimination, torture, violence, slavery or genocide.

Question 17

What are 4 examples of human rights?

Answer 17

The right to life. Being born free and equal. Not subject to torture. Full equality in a fair public trial.

Question 18

What is an example of war crimes that the UK government have been found guilty of?

Answer 18

War crimes in Iraq such as prisoners being tortued.

Question 19

What is the problem with attempting too punish states who break human rights?

Answer 19

How would we decide who to punish them?

Question 20

Who identify 2 explanations of state crime?

Answer 20

Green and Ward

Question 21

What are Green and Wards explanations?

Answer 21

1. Integrated theory. 2. The crime of obedience model

Question 22

What is integrated theory?

Answer 22

This suggests that state crime arises from similar circumstances of other crimes and consists of 3 elements: opportunity, motivation of offenders and failures of control of methods.

Question 23

What’s the crime of obedience model and who came up with it?

Answer 23

It was created by Kelman and Hamilton. Violent states encourage obedience by those who carry out state backed human rights abuses in 3 ways: 1. Authorisation - saying its in line with policy. 2. Dehumanisation- Creating sub humans and marginalised the victims by stripping their identity. 3. Routinisastion, this involves creating routine violence and destruction.

Question 24

What event does Baumen argue was caused by the process of crime of obedience model?

Answer 24

The Holocaust

Question 25

Who came up with the idea of spiral of denial?

Answer 25

Cohen

Question 26

What is the spiral of denial?

Answer 26

Cohen argues that we should study the issue of human rights to focus more on the victims of crimes and charity’s such as amnesty international. He says that states hide their crimes through three stages of the spiral, dictatorships may deny them and democracies may try to legitimise their actions.

Question 27

What can cohens analysis be linked too?

Answer 27

Matzas techniques of neutralisastion

Question 28

Why are human rights a problem of researching state crime?

Answer 28

There is not enough agreement on what human rights actually are so you can’t really use it to define state crime.

Question 29

Why is it hard to find the extent of state crime?

Answer 29

Because goverments will just hide or deny it

Question 30

Why could it be argued that state crimes such as assination and torture are necessary evils?

Answer 30

It can help stop terrorism, this is an issue with researching state crimes.

Question 31

Why is there a huge dark figure of state crime?

Answer 31

Perpetrators are hard to acess to our knowledge is limited too media coverage and secondary documents which may be biased.

Question 32

What did Tombs and Whyte point out?

Answer 32

Researchers are more likely to face strong official resistance as they can use their powers to deny sociologists funding and can refuse access to documents. In some countries they can even risk imprisonment and torture.