State Crime Flashcards
Green and Ward define state crime as…
‘illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by, or with the complicity of, state agencies. This can include genocide, war crimes, torture, imprisonment without trial and assassination. McLaughlin identifies four categories of state crime: political; economic; social/cultural and crimes by security and police forces
- The scale of state crime
The state’s power enables it to commit extremely large scale crimes with widespread victimisation; e.g. in Cambodia between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge government killed up to a fifth of the country’s entire population.
What do Michaloski and Kramer note?
‘Great power and great crimes are inseparable’- The way powerful elites can bring death, disease and loss of tens of thousands with a single decision, and can affect entire human groups through the creation of criminal systems of oppression and exploitation.
- The state is the source of law
Because the state defines what is criminal and manages the criminal justice system, it has the powerful to avoid defining its own harmful actions as criminal. The state’s power means that it can conceal its crimes or evade punishment more easily. For example, the principle of national sovereignty makes it very difficult for external authorities to intervene or apply international conventions against genocide, war crimes etc.
What is a right?
A human right is an entitlement that acts as a protection against the power of the state over an individual.
Human rights and state crime
State crime can be examined through the notion of human rights. Although there is no single agreed list of human rights, most definitions include natural rights, e.g. rights to life and liberty, and civil rights, e.g. to vote. From the human rights perspective, the state can be seen as a perpetrator of crime and not simply as the authority that defines and punishes crime.
The Schwendingers
argue that we should define crime in terms of the violation of basic human rights, rather than the breaking of legal rules. States that deny individuals’ human rights must be regarded as criminal.
In their view, states that practice imperialism, racism or sexism, or inflict economic exploitation on their citizens, are committing crimes.
State crime and the culture of denial
Stanley Cohen sees the issue of human rights and state crime as increasingly central to both political debate and criminology because of the growing international human rights movement and the increased focus on victims. Cohen argues that states conceal and legitimate their human rights crimes.
Dictatorships simply deny commiting human rights abuses where as democratic states have to legitimate their actions by a three stage spiral of state denial
Spiral of state denial
Firstly, they claim ‘it didn’t happen’; then even if there is proof it did happen, “it” is something else (not an abuse) and finally, if it is an abuse, it is justified, e.g. to protect national security
Neutralisation theory
Cohen examines the ways in which states and their officials ‘neutralise’ (deny or justify) their crimes. These include denial of the victim, denial of injury, denial of responsibility, condemning the condemners and appealing to higher loyalties.
Kelman and Hamilton- crimes of obedience
It is often thought that those who carry out crimes such as torture and massacres must be psychopaths. However, research shows that there is little psychological difference between them and ‘normal people’.
Three features which produce crimes of obedience
Authorisation- when acts are ordered or approved by those in authority, normal moral principles are replaced by the duty to obey
Routinisation- once the crime has been committed, there is a strong pressure to turn the act into routine, which individuals can perform in a detached manner.
Dehumanisation- when the enemy is portrayed as subhuman and described as animals, usual principles of morality do not apply
Bauman- modernity and state crime
Some argue that modern society creates the conditions of such crime on a vast scale. Bauman argues that the holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered six million Jews, and millions of Gypsies, Slavs, political opponents and homosexuals, was a product of modernity. He suggests for the Nazis to be able to commit mass murder, the features of modernity were essential. For example, science, technology and the division of labour. The key to understanding the holocaust is therefore the ability of modern society to dehumanise the victims and turn the mass media into a routine administrative task.
