State Crime Flashcards
Problems researching State Crime
TOMBS AND WHYTE - Political resistance, state can refuse.
GREEN AND WARDE - Hard and hazardous
COHEN - Few records so hard to do secondary research. Denial and reclassification makes difficult.
NEWBURN - crime is state defined so controversy over what is crime and what isn’t a state crime.
Why is state crime so significant?
Power of the state means it is able to have a very very large impact on society. Pol Pot’s Cambodia genocide killed 2m.
NEWBURN - law is state defined, can just make their actions legal ie Nuremburg laws in Nazi Germany.
SCHWENDIGERS - Transgressive approach, crime is not an action that is illegal but an action that violates natural rights. Not subservient to state.
abut COHEN - whilst genocide is obviously bad, many crimes are ambiguous. BUT - issue has become key to sociology.
Features of state crime
COHEN - Spiral of denial - deny happened, deny what they thought happened, argue justified (ie war on terror)
HAMILTON AND KELMAN
1) Duty comes before morals, so commit.
2) encouraged to repeat and routinise so become detached.
3) Denial of victim - subhuman.
BAUMAN- Holocaust not throwback to brutal apes but product of modernity - tech to enable detachment.
Types of state crime
MCLAUGHLIN - 4 types
- Political (corruption ie Mubarak £70bn plunder)
- Security/Police (torture 1970s IRA or Hamas leader assassination 2010)
- Economic - Health and Safety violations
- Cultural - racism - Genocide.
What is state crime?
CHAMBLISS ‘ state organised crime’
GREEN AND WARDE - Crime perpetrated by or carried out with the complicity of the state
