State Crime Flashcards
What are the key readings?
Cohen (2013)
Green & Ward (2005)
Neubacher (2021)
What are the key points from Neubacher?
Genocide of European Jews seen as a product of modern, rational, and enlightened European society, not an accident
Obedience to Authority (Milgram’s Theory): Individuals comply with orders to commit atrocities, even if against personal morals. Crucial for understanding state crimes.
Neutralization Theory (Sykes & Matza): Individuals justify criminal actions using techniques like denying harm, blaming victims, or framing actions as for the greater good.
Dehumanization and Ideology: State crimes often involve portraying victims as “less than human” through propaganda, making violence easier for perpetrators.
Cultural and Socialisation Factors: State crimes can be normalized through socialisation in cultures or regimes where such actions are justified or unquestioned.
Compartmentalisation, denial, and diffusion of responsibility enable individuals to commit atrocities for the state.
Himmler’s Speech (1943): Himmler framed Jewish extermination as necessary for the state’s survival, showing how ideology justifies state crimes.
State structures (military, police, government) facilitate state crimes, diluting individual responsibility when crimes are carried out systematically.
What are the key points from Green & Ward?
State crime is a form of organizational deviance where the state, as an institution, commits large-scale acts that violate domestic and international laws.
It is not just individual state agents but the state’s structure and practices that enable such deviance.
States can control the legal and moral definitions of crime, meaning state crimes (e.g., genocide, torture) may not be recognized or punished due to state justification or concealment.
States may legalize or justify these actions through laws or political systems protecting state power.
State crime typically involves direct violations of human rights, including mass killings, torture, imprisonment, and suppression of dissent.
These actions are breaches of moral and ethical principles regarding human dignity and freedom, making state crimes the most egregious.
Civil society plays a crucial role in identifying and challenging state crimes by holding states accountable, questioning their legitimacy, and advocating for human rights.
International human rights organizations, NGOs, and grassroots movements expose state crimes and provide public accountability.
Authoritarian regimes or states at war are more likely to commit state crimes due to their unchecked power.
Criminology has largely ignored state crime, focusing on individual offenses.
The field needs to broaden its perspective to examine state power, legal structures, and the perpetuation of crime on a national/global scale.
There are few mechanisms to hold states or corporations accountable for collective wrongdoing in these cases.
Conventional definitions of crime cannot easily encompass state crimes, which involve institutionalised abuses of power
What are the key points from Cohen?
State crimes are criminal acts carried out or condoned by state authorities, often legitimized by the state itself and framed as necessary for national security, public order, or political ideologies.
Criminology must extend beyond individual and conventional crimes to include systemic, state-driven crimes with widespread consequences.
State crimes often involve the violation of basic human rights, such as the right to life, freedom from torture, and political participation.
Denial of injury: States may claim no harm was done, or that the harm was justified for the greater good.
Blaming the victim: States may accuse victims of being enemies or threats to national security.
Condemnation of the condemners: Those who expose state crimes are discredited as biased or unpatriotic.
Appeal to higher loyalties: States justify violations as necessary for national interests, religion, or ideology.
State crimes can become normalised, particularly when states hold significant power. Over time, the public may view violations of human rights as a normal part of governance or necessary for state power.
He critiques traditional criminology’s focus on individual criminality, emphasising the role of power structures in facilitating large-scale crimes.
Holding states accountable for crimes is challenging due to the state’s monopoly on violence and control over legal and political systems.
International bodies face barriers like lack of jurisdiction, political influence, or reluctance to challenge powerful states.
Cohen calls for criminologists to critically engage with state crime, expanding beyond individual deviance to address large-scale crimes committed by states.
He advocates for a criminology that challenges state power, promotes justice, and defends human rights at both national and international levels.
What is a restrictive definition?
If a state obeys its own laws, can we call its harmful acts criminal or deviant?
What does Sharkansky (1995) suggest?
Labelling a state criminal on grounds other than its own laws violates key precepts of national sovereignty and a nation’s right to regulate itself.
What does Barak 1991 argue?
Argues that if a state obeys its own laws, it should be judged by no higher criterion.
What is an open definition?
The Schwedingers (1970) propose that crime can be socially defined using the notion of human rights and their violation
What do critical criminologists agree with state crimes?
Criminologists studying state crime agree that the use of international law constitutes a basic foundation for defining state crime.
What did Chambliss 1995 do?
Developed his argument with reliance on international treaties and human rights crimes
Who looked at the categories of state crime?
McLaughlin 2001
What did McLaughlin 2001 find?
Political criminality
Economic crime
Criminality associated with police or security, genocide, war crime, ethnic cleansing and torture
Cultural crime
What is political criminality
Ranges from violent to non-violent which are oppositions of political crime
Political corruption
Illegal surveillance
What is violent political criminality?
Terrorism + assassination
What is non-violent political criminality?
Whistleblowing
Espionage
Dissent
What is political criminality
Accepting and soliciting bribes
Corruption
Censorship
What is illegal surveillance?
Intercepting phone calls and emails
What is economic crime
Violating health and safety, illegal collaboration with multi-nationals, monopolization
Who spoke about state corporate crime?
Michalowski & Kramer 2002
What did Michalowski & Kramer 2002 say?
State-corporate crime refers to serious social harms that result from the interaction of political and economic organizations
What are criminologists interested in for economic crime?
Crimes of the powerful’ argue that states and corporations are functionally interdependent
What are the two types of corporate crime?
State-facilitated corporate crime
State initiated corporate crime
What is state facilitated corporate crime?
Where government regulatory institutions fail to restrain deviant business activities because of:
Direct collusion
Shared goals which would be hampered by regulation
What is state-initiated corporate crime?
Where corporations engage in organisational deviance at the direction of, or with tacit approval of, government.
Who looked at COVID?
Gordon & Green 2021
What did Gordon & Green, 2021, find?
Criminal carelessness, state corporate crime as structural violence and issues with race and class
What was the criminal carelessness with COVID?
PPE/Track and Trace, cronyism and a deadly disregard for the vulnerable.
What was the state corporate crime as structural violence with COVID?
Pharmaceutical conglomerates and the impact these relations have on the population.
Necro-economy’ where profit flows from the precipitation of death
What were the issues within race and class during COVID?
COVID not the equaliser it was reported to be.
Who reported race issues during COVID?
ONS 2020
What did ONS, 2020, find?
The risk for black males has been more than three times higher than white males
What is cultural crime?
Encapsulates harms that Appear to affect specific minority or cultural groups (eg. state-sanctioned police violence)
Amount to a form of hate crime (eg. arguably, government Islamophobia has led to increase in hate crime)
What were the death tolls for the Holocaust?
5 – 6 million Jews, including 3.0 – 3.5 million Polish Jews
2.5 – 3.5 million non-Jewish Poles
200000 – 800000 Roma & Sinti
200000 – 300000 people with disabilities
10000 – 25000 gay men
2000 Jehovah’s Witnesses
What is the terror regime?
One of the distinctive features of the Nazi state was its use of institutionalized violence .
It’s highly organized and well planned system of terrorizing the population culminated in the creation of the concentration camp
What were concentration camps used for?
The camps were used to suppress the regime’s political opponents
The camps also became a tool for the exploitation of the inmates by means of forced labour, as well as for the implementation of the Nazi racial policy.
Had badges to distinguish others (yellow for jewish people etc)
What were the 4 factors for the Holocaust and the erosion of empathy?
Dehumanisation, distancing, self-preservation and obedience
How does dehumanisation relate to the erosion of empathy?
Where objects of a bureaucracy are replaced with numbers; removal of civil rights
How does distancing relate to the erosion of empathy?
A) Appeal to sanitation, disgust and revulsion; b) Silencing of scholars as spokesmen for Jews
How does self-preservation relate to the erosion of empathy?
Many Jews cooperated with regime and refused solidarity, supporting the creation of ghettos
How does obedience relate to the erosion of empathy?
Examines Milgram’s experiments in which he demonstrated that average citizens could commit terrible crimes
What are the five attributes of genocide from the international convention for the prevention and punishment of crime of genocide?
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
What did R.J Rummel calculate?
262 million people died between 1900 and 1999 through the ‘murder of any person or people by a government including, genocide, politicide and mass murder’
Who looked at the 8 stages of genocide?
Stanton 1998
What are the 8 stages of genocide?
Classification
Symbolisation
Dehumanisation
Organisation
Polarisation
Preparation
Extermination
Denial
What is classification?
Distinguishing people as ‘them and us’ by ethnicity, race, religion or nationality
What is symbolisation?
Giving names of symbols to classifications (“Jews”, “Gypsies”, distinguishing by colours or dress)
What is dehumanisation?
One group denies humanity of the other. Equated with vermin, disease or insects.
What is organisation?
Genocide is always organised, usually by states, often using militia to provide deniability of state responsibility (Janjaweed in Darfur)
What is polarisation?
Extremists drive groups apart. Hate campaigns are broadcast. Laws may forbid intermarriage or social interaction.
What is preparation?
Victims identified and segregated. Death lists drawn up.
What is extermination?
Mass killing begins. Name refers to the dehumanisation of the victims by perpetrators.
What is denial?
Perpetrators dig up graves, burn bodies, intimidate witnesses, deny crimes and blame victims.
Who looked at the states of exception?
Agamben 2005
What are the state of exception?
Forms of state power that suspend or abrogate the normal rules of law
May be legally defined spaces where ordinary rules do not apply
tate functionaries may carry out ‘crimes of obedience’: acts performed in response to state authority- immoral
Who looked at the state of denial?
Cohen 2001
What are the 6 states of denial?
Literal
Interpretative
Implicatory
Personal
Official
Cultura;
What is literal denial?
Fact/knowledge is denied
What is interpretative denial?
Facts given different meaning from what is apparent to others
What is implicatory denial?
Facts and conventional interpretation accepted, but implications denied or minimized
What is personal denial?
Wholly individual
What is official denial?
Rewriting history, spin-doctoring. Built into ideological apparatus of the state.
What is cultural denial?
Societies arrive at consensus about what can be publicly remembered. Initiated by state but takes on life of its own.
Who looked at bystanders to state crime?
Cohen
What are immediate bystanders?
Those who are actual witnesses to atrocity
What are bystander states?
External or metaphorical bystanders, as consumers of media depictions of suffering
What are external bystanders?
Reluctance to believe atrocities have taken place or intervene and interpret info as allegation
Who spoke about criminology and genocide?
Moon (2011)
Hagan (2009)
Rymand-Richmond (2013)
What did Moon (2011) say?
Argues that the institutionalization and professionalization of criminology has led to the closing down of the ‘criminological imagination’ to deal with genocide.
What did Hagan (2009) say?
Examines how anti-semitism and the US’s genocidal origins may have contributed to the marginalisation of criminological work on genocide.
What did Rymand-Richmond do?
Outlined the methodological challenges associated with genocide research
