GOVERNMENTAL CRIME

Governmental Crime

Governmental Crime

Introduction

Governmental crimes or state crimes have historically resulted in more injury and death than traditional street crimes such as robbery, theft, and assault. Consider that genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes during the 20th century in Afghanistan, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Chechnya, Chile, Darfur, Germany, Iraq, Palestine, Rwanda, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, and other regions claimed the lives of tens of millions of people, and millions more were rendered homeless, imprisoned, and psychologically and physically damaged through the illegal or socially harmful actions of governments.

Yet, despite the gravity, costs, and extensiveness of crimes committed by states, few government officials, and fewer average citizens in developed countries, think much about these offenses or do anything to prevent or control these grievous harms. Further, these depredations remain understudied relative to conventional street crimes in the field of criminology and criminal justice (Rothe 2009, p. 45). Over the last two decades, while considerable theoretical, conceptual, and empirical progress has been made by criminologists to better specify the nature, extent, distribution, causal variables, and issues associated with state violence, there remain two primary areas of debate among criminologists: the standard by which to define state crime, and the contentious issue of controlling state criminality for practitioners, politicians, citizens, and scholars of state crime.

History of State Crime Research

The study of state crime can be traced back to Edwin Sutherland, who called attention to a then-neglected form of crime, namely the crimes of respectable people in the context of a legitimate occupation, and of corporations (Rothe 2009, pp. 265). His extension of the concept of crime beyond conventional parameters provided an important foundation that was built upon by several later scholars of white-collar crime. William Chambliss, in his 1988 American Society of Criminology Presidential Address, provided a more direct and immediate inspiration for increasingly systematic attention to crimes of the state by a number of criminologists.

The early research of the 1990s on state criminality was plagued by definitional issues and generated much debate regarding whether the individual or the state (organization) was culpable for acts deemed state crime, and what standards should be used to define state criminality. These two contested areas cut to the core of the field of criminology in general; therefore, the debate made its way into the early infancy of the development of the field of state crime (Berk 2007, p. 5).

Dating back to Sutherland, the notion of an organization being criminally liable had consistently been met with resistance by criminologists until the late 1970s through the mid-1980s (Rothe 2009, p. 98). During this period, some criminologists began to incorporate ideas from organizational sociologists' research as they argued that social scientists needed to move beyond focusing on the individuals who make up an organization and recognize that the aggregate whole functions as an entity. As such, it was suggested that organizations, as social actors, could and should be the primary focus of analysis in state and corporate crime.

Others strongly objected to the notion of a state as a social ...