State Crimes

State crimes:

• Green & Ward: "State crime is the illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by or with the complicity of state agencies".
• It includes all forms of crime committed by or on behalf of states and governments in order to further their policies.
• State crimes do not include acts that merely benefit individuals who work for the state, such as police officers who accept bribes.

The Seriousness of State Crime:

1. The scale of state crime: the power of the state enables it to commit extremely large-scale crimes with widespread victimisation
2. The state is the source of the law: it is its role to define what is criminal and to manage the criminal justice system and prosecute its offenders.

• Its power means that it can conceal its crime, evade punishment for them and even avoid defining its own actions as criminal in the first place

• State crime undermines the system of justice and public faith in it.

• However the principle of national sovereignty - that states are the supreme authority within their own borders - makes it difficult for external authorities (e.g. EU) to intervene. This is despite the existence of international conventions and laws against acts such as genocide. 📝Examples of state crimes:

• Torture and illegal treatment or punishment of citizens.

• Gaddafi regime in Libya - overthrown in 2011

• UK in the 1970s used 'white noise' to torture IRA suspects.

• UK paid £14 million in compensation to Iraqis who were illegally tortured and detained

• US - Guantanamo Bay

• War crimes: Israel has repeatedly been condemned for the deliberate targeting of civilian populations in the Israel-Palestine conflict. UK accused of war crimes in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

• Corruption: organised stealing of money e.g. Egyptian dictator Mubarak - embezzled money

• Assassination or 'targeted killing': Instruments of state power, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh - the Palestinian Hama commander was killed in Dubai in 2010

• Genocide: systematic mass murder of people belonging to an ethnic, national or religious group, Natzi's against the Jews, Rwanda genocide of 1994

• State sponsored terrorism: the state itself carrying out terrorist acts or supporting others doing it. The US supported illegal rebel groups against elected regimes e.g. in Central and South America.

Problems with defining state crimes:

3. There is considerable controversy in defining what a state crime is: the state is the source of law and it defines what a crime is. It has the power to avoid defining its own acts as criminal (e.g. Natzi persecution of Jews was permitted under German law)
4. Even if states commit acts that are clearly illegal under international law, they have the power to disguise, decriminalise and justify these offences Transgressive approach to state crime - the violation of human rights:

• Because of the problems defining state crime, sociologists have adopted a more transgressive approach - this involves going outside the usual boundaries of defining crime as simply law-breaking
• Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1975) and Green and Ward (2012) suggest that state crimes should be considered as violations of human rights. This is their definition "State organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights"

Different definitions of State crime:

5. Domestic law - Chambliss: defines state crime as acts defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in pursuit of their jobs as representatives of the state. A02: synoptic link to Marxism - crimes of the powerful

A03: However, using state explanation of crime is inadequate and ignores the fact that the state can manipulate the definition.

📝For example during Natzi Germany, laws were legalised permitting it to compulsorily sterilise the disabled.

6. Social harms and zemiology (transgressive approach): This recognises much of the harm done by the state is not against the law – Michalowski (2004) defines state crimes as not only illegal acts but legally permissible acts whose consequences are similar to those of illegal acts, in the harms they cause. Hillyard et al (2014): we should have a much wider view of state wrongdoing – we should replace the study of crime with – zemiology = the study of harms, whether or not they are against the law.

📝For example, these harms would include state-facilitated poverty.

This definition prevents states from ruling themselves 'out of court', by making laws that allow them to misbehave. It also creates a single standard that can be applied to different states to identify which ones are most harmful to human or environmental well-being.

A03: critics argue that the harm definition is very vague - how much harm must occur before an act is defined as a crime? Who decides what counts as harm?

7. Labelling and societal reaction: Labelling theory argues that whether an act constitutes as a crime will depend on whether the social audience for that act defines it as a crime the audience may see the act directly or indirectly - e.g. through media reports,

• This definition recognises that crime is socially constructed, so what people define as star crime (due to different cultures/beliefs etc. A03: this definition is even vaguer than social harms

8. International law: some sociologists base their definition of state crime on international law – laws created through treaties and agreements between states e.g. Geneva + Hague Conventions on war crimes. For example – Rothe and Mullins (2008) define state crime as or behalf of a state that violates international law and/or a state's own domestic law.
9. Advantage: uses globally agreed definitions of state crime intentionally designed to deal with state crime, unlike domestic law. A03: Laws are made by individual states, International law is socially constructed, involving the use of power, for example, sociologists found that countries have changed their laws to suit their actions.

• Human rights: Sociologists use human rights as a way of defining state crime:
• Natural rights – rights people naturally have, e.g. right to live
• Civil rights – such as the right to vote, to privacy and to fair trial and education
  Herman and Schwendinger (1975) argue we should define crime as the violation of people's basic human rights by the state or its agents States that practice imperialism, racism, sexism and economic exploitation are committing crimes because they are denying people their basic rights Risse et al (1998) argues that the strength of this perspective – all states share the same ethos, of shared human rights.

A03: Cohen criticises Schwendinger arguing that crimes like torture are explicitly open crimes, whilst economic exploitation is more hidden and is not a self-evident crime.

Explaining state crime

The Authoritarian Personality:

-Adorno et al (1950) identify an 'authoritarian personality' – includes civilians willing to obey the orders of superiors without question. -They argue that at the time of WWII, many Germans had punitive personality types because of their disciplined socialisation.

-Some argue those who commit torture/genocide must be psychopaths – but research shows they are no different to normal human beings.

A02: Adolf Eichmann was an SS officer in Nazi Germany. He was placed in charge of the logistics of Hitler's final solution--the mass extermination of Jews -so Eichmann was responsible for the murder of millions of people.

Crimes of obedience

State crimes are crimes of conformity because they require obedience from a higher authority – the state or its representative. Researchers suggest that many people are willing to obey authority even when this involves harming others – sociologists argue that such actions are part of a role into which individuals are socialised.

Kelman & Hamilton (1989) identify 3 general features that produce crimes of obedience:

1. Authorisation = when acts are ordered or approved by those in authority, normal moral principles are replaced by the duty to obey.

2. Routinisation = Once the crime has been committed, there is a strong pressure to turn the act into a routine that individuals can perform in a detached manner.

3. Dehumanisation = when the enemy is portrayed as sub-human, normal principles of morality do not apply.

Bauman - the Holocaust was made possible by these processes. -My Lai Massacre in Vietnam: 400 civilians killed by American soldiers, 26 soldiers charged and 1 convicted.

Culture of Denial:

Alvarez (2010) = recent years have shown the growing impact of the international human rights movement e.g. Amnesty International = puts pressure on states

-Cohen argues that while dictatorships generally simply deny committing human rights abuses, democratic states have to legitimate their actions in more complex ways. In doing so, their justifications follow a three-stage 'spiral of state denial':

• Stage 1 - 'It didn't happen' e.g. the state claims there was no massacre but then human rights organisations, victims and the media show it did happen.
• Stage 2 - 'If it did happen, "it" is something else'. The state says it is not what it looks like- it's 'collateral damage' or 'self-defence'.
• Stage 3 - 'Even if it is what you say it is, it's justified'- e.g. 'to protect national security' or 'fight the war on terror'
  📝e.g. US entering Iraq.

A02 - Stage 1 example

-US government's active collusion in the cover-up of the 1981 El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. -The Salvadoran Army killed more than 800 civilians in the civil war

-At the same time as claiming that its El Salvadoran ally was making every effort to improve its human rights record (and therefore was eligible for aid to be certified by Congress), US Embassy officials in El Salvador and the State Department were involved in baroque manoeuvres to deny what they knew about the massacre

• The Salvadoran army and government leaders denied the reports and officials of the Reagan administration called them "gross exaggerations". The Associated Press reported that "the U.S. Embassy disputed the reports, saying its own investigation had found... that no more than 300 people had lived in El Mozote Culture of denial - Neutralisation theory:

Cohen examines the ways in which states and their officials deny or justify their crimes. He draws on the work of Sykes and Matza, who identify 5 neutralisation techniques that delinquents use to justify their deviant behaviour.

10. Denial of victim: They exaggerate; they are terrorists; they are used to violence; look what they do to each other.
11. Denial of injury: They started it; we are the real victims, not them.
12. Denial of responsibility- I was only obeying orders, doing my duty.
13. Condemning the condemners The whole world is picking on us; it's worse elsewhere; they are condemning us only because of their anti-Semitism.
14. Appeal to higher loyalty: Self-righteous justifications- the appeal to the higher cause, whether the nation, the revolution, the defence of the 'free world', state security etc. -These techniques do not seek to deny that the event has even occurred. Rather, as Cohen says, 'they seek to negotiate or impose a different construction of the even from what might appear to be the case. = trying to sway the public's opinion of their actions

Why is state crime hard to research: -

Governments adopt strategies of denial to either deny or justify their actions or reclassify them as something else

• They have unlimited power – can cover up their crimes So there are no official statistics! There are no victim surveys!
• Therefore we do not know the true figure of state crime. The dark figure of hidden state crimes is probably much greater than that of unreported conventional crime -Researchers rely on media reports – but again, this is secondary data – can we trust it?! -Researchers are likely to face strong official resistance – states can use their power to prevent and hinder sociologists from doing research threats, refusing to provide funding, denying access
• In dictatorships, researchers risk imprisonment, torture and death as enemies of the state -There is no fixed definition – how can it be researched properly? -No universal definition -Data will be unrepresentative!