State Crime Flashcards
What are state crimes?
Crimes committed by governments
Defined by Green and Ward as ‘illegal or deviant activities perpetuated by, or with, the complicity of state agencies.’
According to McLaughlin, how many categories of state crime are there?
4 categories
These categories include: Crimes by security and police forces, economic crimes, social and cultural crimes, and political crimes.
What are natural rights?
Rights that people have simply by virtue of existing, such as the right to liberty and free speech.
What are civil rights?
Rights such as the right to vote, to privacy, to a fair trial, or to an education.
According to Herman and Schwedinger, how should crimes be defined?
Crimes should be defined as those which violate basic human rights rather than law breaking.
Who criticised Herman and Schwedinger and what did they say?
Cohen: It’s unclear - blurs the line between morals and legality
EG: acts like economic exploitation arent illegal, just morally wrong
What does Cohen argue regarding state crimes?
States conceal and legitimize their human rights crimes.
What did Cohen find about the methods used by dictatorships to deny human rights abuses?
They simply deny that the abuses are happening.
referred to as ‘spiral of denial’
What is the ‘Spiral of Denial’?
A three-step process used by democratic states to justify abuses.
What are the five steps in the denial process?
- Denial of the victim
- Denial of the injury
- Denial of responsibility
- Condemning the condemners
- Appeal to higher loyalty
What is the relationship between state crime and the social conditions of perpetrators?
Evidence theres little that differentiates us from perpetrators; situations lead to the commission of these crimes.
Supported by Kelman and Hamilton through ‘crimes of obedience’
According to Kelman and Hamilton, what are three features that produce ‘crimes of obedience’?
- Authorisation: acts approved by forms of authority
- Routinisation: can lead to desensitisation and detachment
- Dehumanization: enemy portrayed as sub human (animal etc)
Who considers predatory street crime to be more serious than consumer fraud?
Wilson.
What is the impact of focusing on corporate crime according to the document?
It adds to the myth that young, economically disadvantaged males perpetrate the majority of crime.
Society hyper-fixtates on this type of crime = unawareness to corporate crime
What do Marxists believe about state crime?
They look at all manner of harmful activity as being state crime.
What is a criticism of the human rights discourse?
It can be ethnocentric, seeking to apply western norms to all societies.
True or False: The absence of health and safety legislation can be considered state crime by some.
True.
