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) is crucial to understand state crime
State crimes often involve portraying victims as “less than human” through propaganda, making violence easier for perpetrators.
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.
State structures (military, police, government) facilitate state crimes, diluting individual responsibility when crimes are carried out systematically.
What did the Himmler speech of 1943 do?
Himmler framed Jewish extermination as necessary for the state’s survival, showing how ideology justifies state crimes.
Who made the neutralisation theory?
Sykes & Matza
What is the neutralisation theory?
Individuals justify criminal actions using techniques like denying harm, blaming victims, or framing actions as for the greater good.
What are the key points from Green & Ward?
States can control the legal and moral definitions of crime, meaning state crimes (e.g., genocide, torture) may not be recognised or punished due to state justification or concealment.
States may legalise or justify these actions through laws or political systems protecting state power.
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 offences.
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 groups exposed state crime?
International human rights organizations
NGOs
Grassroots movements
Civil society: holding states accountable, questioning their legitimacy, and advocating for human rights.
What are the key points from Cohen?
Criminology must extend beyond individual and conventional crimes to include systemic, state-driven crimes with widespread consequences.
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.
Who looked at the key factors of state crime?
Cohen
What are the key factors of state crime
Denial of injury
Blaming the victim
Condemnation of the condemners
Appeal to higher loyalties
What is denial of injury?
States claiming no harm was done or justify that it was for the greater good
What is blaming the victim?
Accusing victim of being enemies or threats to national security
What is condemnation of the condemners?
The belief that those expose state crimes are discredited as biased or unpatriotic.
What is appeal to higher loyalties?
States justify violations as necessary for national interests, religion, or ideology.
Can cause normalisation, particularly when states hold significant power.
Who defined state crime?
Green & Ward
What is state crime?
State crime is a form of organizational deviance where the state, as an institution, commits large-scale acts that violate domestic and international laws.
Violation of human rights
It is not just individual state agents but the state’s structure and practices that enable such deviance.
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 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?
Schwedingers (1970)= 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.
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
Accepting and soliciting bribes
Corruption
Censorship
What is violent political criminality?
Terrorism + assassination
What is non-violent political criminality?
Whistleblowing
Espionage
Dissent
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
Cultural
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
