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Crime and Deviance - Coggle Diagram
Crime and Deviance
Class, power and crime
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Crimes of the powerful
White collar and corporate crimes:
- The term ‘white collar crime’ was coined by Sutherland (1949) who he defined as: “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation”.
- Pearce and Tombs (2003) define corporate crime as: “any illegal act or omission that is the result of deliberate decisions or culpable negligence by a legitimate business organisation and that is intended to benefit the business”
The scales and types of corporate crime:
- Financial crimes: such as tax evasion, bribery, money laundering and illegal accounting.
- Crimes against consumers: such as false labelling and selling unfit goods.
- Crimes against employees: such as sexual and racial discrimination, violation of wage laws, and of rights to join a union.
- Crimes against the environment: include illegal pollution of air, water, and land, such as toxic waste dumping.
- State corporate crime: refers to harm committed when government institutions and businesses cooperate to pursue their goals.
The abuse of trust:
- High-status professionals occupy positions of trust and respectability. As Carrabine et al (2014) note, we entrust them with our finances, our health our security and our personal information. However, their position and status give them the opportunity to abuse this trust.
- Harold Shipman
- Enron scandal
- Wirecard
- BP oil spill
- NatWest money laundering
Why is there such an invisibility of corporate crime:
- The media: they give very little coverage to corporate crime thus reinforcing the stereotype that crimes are committed by the working class.
- Lack of political will: for example, the Home Office uses crime surveys to discover the true extent of ‘ordinary crime’, yet it does not do so for corporate crime.
- The crimes are often complex
- De-labelling: at the level of laws and legal regulation, corporate crime is consistently filtered out from the process of criminalisation.
- Under-reporting: Often the victim is society at large, or the environment, rather than an identifiable individual.
Marxism, class, and crime
The state and law making:
- Marxists see law-making and law enforcement as only serving the interests of the capitalist class. For example, Chambliss (1975) argues that laws to protect private property are the cornerstone of the capitalist economy.
- Chambliss illustrates this with the case of the introduction of English law into Britain’s East African colonies.
- The ruling class also have the power to prevent the introduction of laws that would threaten their interests. Snider (1993) argues that the capitalist state is reluctant to pass laws that regulate the activities of businesses or threaten their profitability.
Criminogenic capitalism:
- Capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class, which is damaging to the WC, and this may give a rise to crime.
- However, capitalism is a ‘dog eat dog’ system of ruthless competition among capitalists. The need to win along with the desire for self-enrichment encourages capitalists to commit white-collar crimes and corporate crimes.
- Gordon (1976) argues, crime is a rational response to the capitalist system and so it’s found in all social classes, even though official statistics make it seem to be a working-class phenomenon.
Evaluation of Marxism
- The Marxist approach is criticised on several grounds:
- It ignores the relationship between crime and non-class inequalities such as ethnicity and gender.
- It's too deterministic and over-predicts the amount of crime in the working class: not all people commit a crime, despite the pressures of poverty.
- Not all capitalist societies have high crime rates; for example, the homicide rate in Japan and Switzerland is only a fifth of that in the US.
- The CJS does sometimes act against the interests of the capitalist class. For example, prosecutions for corporate crime do occur.
- Left realists argue that Marxism ignores intra-class crimes such as burglary and ‘mugging’, which cause great harm to victims.
Ideological functions of crime and law:
- Pearce (1976) argues that laws such as workplace health and safety laws often benefit the ruling class as well as the working class. By giving capitalism a ‘caring face’, such laws also create false consciousness among the workers.
- In any case, such laws aren’t rigorously enforced. For example, despite a new law against corporate homicide being passed in 2007, in its first 8 years, there was only one successful prosecution of a UK company, despite many deaths due to employers’ negligence (Jenabi, 2014).
- Because the state enforces the law selectively, crime appears to be largely a working-class phenomenon, this divides the working class by encouraging workers to blame the criminals for the midst of their problems, rather than capitalism.
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Control, punishment and victims
Surveillance
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Foucault: the birth of the prison:
- Foulcault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison opens with a striking contrast between 2 forms of punishment:
- Sovereign power was typical of the period before the 19th century, when the monarch had absolute power over people and their bodies. Punishment was a brutal, emotional spectacle.
- Disciplinary power becomes dominant in the 19th century. In this form of control, a new system of discipline seeks to govern not just the body, but the mind or 'soul'. It does so through surveillance.
- The Panopticon Foucault illustrates disciplinary power with the Panopticon. This was a design for a prison where each prisoner in their cell is visible to the guards from a central viewpoint, but the guards weren't visible to the prisoners.
- The prisoners don't know if they are being watched, but they know they might be being watched, resulting in their self-surveilling and self-disciplining
Criticisms of Foucault:
- He exaggerates the extent of control. Goffman shows how some inmates of prisons and mental hospitals are able to resist control. Foucault overestimates the power of surveillance to change behaviour, people become self-disciplining as they can't be sure they aren't being monitored.
- CCTV cameras are a form of panopticism, but they aren't necessarily effective in preventing crime. Norris's review of dozens of studies worldwide found that while CCTV reduced crimes in car parks, it had little or no effect on other crimes, and may even cause displacement.
- Gil and Loveday found that a few robbers, burglars and shoplifters were put off by CCTV. Its real function may be ideological, falsely reasuring the public about their security, even though it makes little difference.
The 'dispersal of discipline':
- Foucault argues that the prison is just one range of institutions that, from the 19th century, increasingly began to subject individuals to disciplinary power to induce conformity through self-surveillance.
- Non-prison-based social control practices form part of a 'carceral archipelago'. A series of 'prison islands' spread into other institutions and wider societies, where professionals exercise surveillance over the population.
- In Foucault's view, disciplinary power has now dispersed through society, penetrating every social institution to reach every individual.
- So the form of surveillance in the Panopticon is now a model of how power operates in society as a whole.
Punishment
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Marxism: capitalism and punishment:
- For Marxists, the function of punishment is to maintain the existing social order. Thompson describes hw in the 18th century punishments such as hanging and transportation to the colonies for themft and poaching were part of a 'rule of terror' by the landed aristocracy of the poor.
- The form of punishment relfects the economic base of society. Rusche and Kirchheimer argue each type of economy has its own corresponding penal system. They argue under capitalism, imprisonment becomes the dominant form of punishment.
- Melossi and Pavarini see imprisonment as relfecting capitalist relations of production. For example, capitalism puts a price on the worker's time; so too prisoners 'do time' to 'pay' for their crime.
Alternatives to prison:
- In recent years, there has been a growth in the range of community-based controls, such as curfews, community service orders etc. However, at the same time, the numbers in custody have been rising steadily, especially among the young.
- This led to Cohen arguing that the growth of community controls has simply cast the net of control over more people. Following Foucault's idea, Cohen argues that the increased range of sanctions available simply enables control to penetrate deeper into society.
- Instead, of community controls diverting young people away from the CJS, they divert them into it. For example, some argue that police have used ASBOs as a way of fast-tracking young offenders into custodial sentences.
The era of mass incarceration?
- According to Garland, the USA, and to a lesser extent the UK, is moving to an era of mass incarceration.
- From the 1970s, the number of prisoners began to rise rapidly, there are now 1.5 million state and federal prisoners in prisons like Rikers Island, compared to 100-120 per 100,000 people.
- 5 million are under the supervision of the CJS, in total, over 3% of the adult population. This is 3x the European rate of imprisonment, although victimisation in the US is similar to those in Europe.
- Black Americans are only 13% of the US population while being 37% of the prison population. They are 6x more likely to be in prison compared to white males, and 2x more likely than Hispanic or Native American males.
- This may have an ideological function. Downes argues that the US prison system soaks up 30-40% of the unemployed, making capitalism look more successful.
Imprisonment today:
- In liberal democracies that don't have the death penalty, imprisonment is the harshest form of punishment, but 2/3s of prisoners commit further crimes on release.
- Since the 1980s there has been a move towards 'populist punitiveness', where politicians have sought electoral popularity by calling for tougher sentences.
- For example, New Labour governments after 1997 took the view that prison should be used not just for serious offences, but also as a deterrent for persistent petty offenders.
- This led to an increase in the prison population, between 1992 and 2016, the number of prisoners in England and Wales doubled to a total of 85,000. One issue with the overcrowding is that it added to the existing problem of poor sanitation barely edible food etc.
- The prison population is largely male, young and poorly educated. Black and ethnic minorities are over-represented.
Transcarceration:
- There is a trend towards transcreation, the idea that individuals become locked into a cycle of control, shifting between different carceral agencies during their lives.
- For example, someone might be brought up in care, then sent to a young offenders institution, then adult prison, with bouts in a mental hospital in between.
- Sociologists see transcreation as a product of the blurring boundaries between criminal justice and welfare agencies.
- For example, health, housing and social services are increasingly being given crime control, and they often engage in multi-agency working with the police, sharing data on the same individuals.
The changing role of prisons:
- Until the 18th century, prison was used mainly for holding offenders prior to their punishment.
- It was only following the Enlightenment that imprisonment began to be seen as a form of punichment itself, where offenders would be 'reformed' through hard labour, religious instruction and surveillance.
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The victims of crime
Positivist victimology
Evaluation:
- This approach identifies certain patterns of interpresonal vinctimisation, but ignores widerstructural factors influencing victimisation such as poverty and patriarchy.
- It can easily tip over into victim blaming. Amir claims that 1 in 5 rapes are victim precipiatted and isn't very different from saying that they 'asked for it'.
- It ignores suutations where victims are unaware of their victimisagion, as with some crimes against the environment, and where harm is done but no law is broken.
- Miller defines positivist victimology as having 3 features:
- It aims to identify the factors that produce patterns in victimisation.
- It focuses on interpersonal crimes of violence.
- It aims to identify victims who have contributed to their own victimisation.
- The earliest positivist studies focused on the idea of victim proneness. They sought to identify the social and psychological characteristics of victims that make them different from non-victims.
- Von Henting identified 13 characteristics of victims, such as they are likely to be female, elderly or 'mentally subnormal'. The implication is that the victim in some sense 'invites' victimisation by being the kind of person they are.
- Wolfgang's study of 588 homicides, found that 26% involved victim precipitation - the victim triggered the events leading to the homicide, for instance by being the first to use violence.
Critical victimology
- Critical victimology is based on conflict theories and shares the same approach as critical criminology: It focuses on 2 elements.
- Structural factors, such as patriarchy and poverty, place powerless groups such as women and the poor at greater risk of victimisation. Mawby and Walklate argue that a victimisation is a form of structural powerlessness.
- The state's power to apply or deny the label of victim. 'Victim' is a social construct in the same way as 'crime' and 'criminal'. Through the CJ process, the state applies the label of victim to some but withholds it from others.
- Tombs and Whyte show that 'safety crimes' where employers' violations of the law lead to death or injury to workers, are often explained away as the fault of 'accident prone' workers.
Evaluation:
- CV disregards the role victims play in bringing victimisation on themsleves through their own choices, or their own offending.
- It's valuable in drawing attention to the way that 'victim' status is constructed by power and how this benefits the powerfulat the expense of the powerless.
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Ethnicity, crime and justice
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Gender, crime and justice
Why do men commit crime?
Criticisms of Messerschmidt:
- Is masculinity an explanation of male crime, or just a description of male offences?
- Messerschmidt is danger of a circular argument, that masculinity explains male crimes because they are committed by males.
- Messerschmidt doesn’t explain why not all men use crime to accomplish masculinity.
- He overworks the concept of masculinity to explain virtually all male crimes, from joy riding to embezzlement.
Winlow: postmodernity, masculinity, and crime:
- Globalisation has led to a shift from a modern industrial society to a late modern or postmodern de-industrialised society.
- This led to the loss of many of the traditional manual jobs through which working-class men were able to express their masculinity by hard physical labour and providing for their families.
- Bouncers were central figures involved in Wilow’s (2001) study of masculinity in the formerly industrial city of Sunderland in North-East.
- He found that ‘bouncing’ offered many young men employment after deindustrialisation and employment engulfed the city.
- Not only did bouncing provide legitimate employment, but it also provided a way into organised crime in the ‘night-time economy’.
- Drugs
- Alcohol
- Prostitution
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Explaining female crime
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Physiological causes of crime:
- Lombroso (1895) compared the anatomical features of female criminals and non-criminals. He believed that male criminals could be identified by physical abnormalities such has an extra toe or nipple.
- Few women had these features; therefore, they weren’t ‘born criminals’.
Case studies
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- Karen Matthews:
- Labelled Britain’s worst mother.
- She hid her daughter under her bed for 24 days, claiming she had been kidnapped to claim the reward money.
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- Myra Hindley:
- The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around Manchester, England
- The victims were five children aged between 10 and 17, at least four of whom were sexually assaulted.
- They received life sentences.
- Characterised by the press as "the most evil woman in Britain", brady was diagnosed as a psychopath.
- She grew up in an unstable house, her father was an
violent alchoholic and encouraged violence.
Women in the CJS
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Gender patterns in crime:
- Heidensohn and Silvestri (2012) observe that gender differences are the most significance feature of recorded crime/ significant differences among offenders. Official stats show that:
- 4/5 convicted offenders in England and Wales are male.
- By the age of 40, 9% of females have a criminal conviction, against 32% of males.
- A higher proportion of female than male offenders are convicted of property offences.
- A higher proportion of male than female offenders are convicted of violence of sexual offences.
- Males are more likely to be repeat offenders, to have longer criminal careers and to commit more serious crimes. For example, men are 15x more likely to be convicted of homicide.
- These sats raise 3 questions:
- Do women commit so few crimes, or are the figures an invalid picture?
- How can we explain why those women do offend commit crimes?
- Why do males commit more crimes than females
- Do women commit more crime?
- Typically, ‘female’ crimes are less likely to be reported. For example, shop lifting is less likely to be reported than violent or sexual crimes, often committed by men.
- Even when women’s crimes are detected or reported, they are less likely to be prosecuted or, if prosecuted, more likely to be let off lightly.
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Functionalist, Strain and Subcultural theories
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Merton's strain theory
- Strain theories argue that people engage in deviant behaviour when they are unable to achieve socially approved goals by legitimate means
- The first strain theory was developed by Merton (1938), who adapted Durkheim’s concept of anomie to explain deviance. Merton’s explanation combines 2 elements:
- Structural factors: society’s unequal opportunity structure.
- Cultural factors: the strong emphasis on success goals and the weaker emphasis on using legitimate means to achieve them.
- For Merton, deviance is the result of a strain between 2 things:
- The goals that a culture encourages individuals to achieve
- What the institutional structure of society allows them to achieve legitimately
The American Dream:
- Americans are expected to pursue this goal by legitimate means: self-discipline, study, educational qualifications, and hard work in a career.
- The ideology of the ‘American Dream’ tells Americans that their society is a meritocratic one.
- However, many disadvantaged groups are denied opportunities to achieve legitimately.
- The strain between the cultural goal of monetary success and the lack of legitimate opportunities to achieve it produced frustration and created pressure to resort to illegitimate means such as crime and deviance. Merton calls this pressure to deviate, the strain to anomie.
- According to Merton, the pressure to deviate is increased by American culture putting emphasis on achieving success at any price than upon doing so by legitimate means. Winning the game becomes more important than playing by the rules.
Deviant adaptations to strain:
- Merton uses strain theory to explain some of the patterns of deviance found in society.
- He argues that an individual’s position in the social structure affects the way they adapt or responds to the strain of anomie:
- Conformity: individuals accept culturally approved goals and strive to achieve them legitimately. This is most likely among middle-class individuals who have good opportunities to achieve, but Merton sees it as the typical response of most Americans
- Innovation: individuals accept the goal of monetary success but use ‘new’, illegitimate means such as theft or fraud to achieve it. Those at the lower end of the class structure are under creates pressure to innovate.
- Ritualism: individuals give up on trying to achieve their goals but have internalised the legitimate means, so they follow the rules for their own sake. This is typical of lower-middle-class office workers in dead-end, routine jobs.
- Retreatism: individuals reject both the goals and the legitimate means and become dropouts. Merton includes ‘psychotics, outcasts, vagrants, tramps, chronic drunkards, and drug addicts as examples.
- Rebellion: individuals reject the existing society’s goals and means, but they replace them with new ones in a desire to bring out revolutionary change and create a new kind of society. Rebels include political radicals and countercultures such as hippies.
Evaluation:
- It takes official crime statistics at face value. These over-represent working-class crime, so Merton sees crime as a mainly working-class phenomenon. Its also too deterministic; the working class experience the most strain, yet they don’t all deviate.
- Marxists argue that it ignores the power of the ruling class to make and enforce the laws in the ways that criminalise the poor but not the rich.
- It assumes there is a value consensus – that everyone strives for ‘money success’ – and ignores the possibility that many may not share this goal.
- It only accounts for utilitarian crime for monetary gain, and not crimes of violence, vandalism, etc… it’s also hard to see how it could account for state crimes such as genocide or torture.
- It explains how deviance results from individuals adapting to the strain to anomie but ignores the role of group deviance, such as delinquent subcultures.
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Globalisation, green crime, human rights and state crime
Globalisation and crime
Patterns of a criminal organisation:
- Found that the way that crime is organised is linked to the economic changes brought by globalisation.
- Found that it involved individuals with contacts acting as a hub, around which a loose know network forms, composed of individuals seeking opportunities. SYNOPTIC LINK: strain theory.
- Hobbs and Dunningham argue that this contrasts with the large-scale, hierarchal organisations of the past. i.e., the Kray twins.
- Winlow, Sunderland bouncers (Media and crime)
- Glocal organisation:
- These new forms of organisation sometimes have international links, especially with the drugs trade, but crime is still rooted in its local context.
- For example, individuals still need contacts and networks to find opportunities and sell their drugs., Hobbs and Dunningham, therefore, say crime acts as a global system, it's still locally sourced with local connections.
- McMafia:
- Uses the new example of the new Russian gangs to illustrate a new order since the changes in Eastern Europe.
- Many former officials bought up such things as coal, gas, steel, and diamonds at low prices after the changes and have made mega millions as they sold them on to the West. These are referred to as ‘oligarchs’.
- Ukraine war has turned this on its head, with sanctions provided by the UK government for oligarchs.
- Old-style KGB were enlisted to provide protection and have become world famous e.g., Chechen Mafia.
- Like with glocal organisations above these are fluid strictures and very unlike traditional Italian and US mafia which have deep-seated family-linked hierarchies.
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Taylor et al (1997):
- Sees globalisation creating crime at both ends of the social spectrum:
- Lower social groups:
- Lack of legitimate jobs means that illegal options become more enticing to lower social groups.
- Drugs and gang activity have increased in many inner cities around the world.
- Higher social groups:
- Globalisation of the money markets has led to more insider dealing, tax evasion and financial fraud.
Castells (1998):
- Identifies several such crimes:
- Arms trafficking
- Nuclear material trafficking.
- Human trafficking
- Cyber crimes
- Sex tourism
- Terrorism
- Drugs
- Money laundering
- A lot of this is supply led by the developing countries and demand led by the western world.
- Such threats have led to many countries wanting to tighten borders as fear of problems being imported is heightened by the media reporting of these crimes.
Crimes of globalisation:
- Rothe and Friedrichs (2015) examine the role of international financial organisations such as the IMF and World Bank.
- These bodies impose pro-capitalist, neoliberal economic SAPs on poor countries as a condition for the loans they provide. They often require governments to cut spending on health and education and to privatise publicly owned services.
- Whilst this allows Western corporations to expand in these countries, it creates conditions for crime.
- For example, in Rwanda in the 1980s the programmes caused mass unemployment and created the economic basis for the 1944 genocide.
- Globalisation refers to the way in which the world is becoming much more interconnected and the barriers between countries are disappearing.
State crime
Defining state crime:
- Social harms and zemiology: Michalowksi (1985) defines state crime as 'legally permissible acts whose consequences are similar to those of illegal acts, in the harm they cause, not just illegal acts.
- Hillyard et al (2004) argue that we should take a wider view of state wrongdoing. we should replace the study of crimes with 'zemiology' - the study of harms.
- This definition prevents states from ruling themselves 'out of court' by making laws that allow them to misbehave, it creates a single standard that can be applied to different states to identify which ones are most harmful.
- However, critics argue that a 'harms' definition is potentially vague:
- What level of harm must occur before an act is defined as a crime? There is a danger that it makes the field of study too wide.
- Who describes what counts as harm? Replaces the state's arbitrary definition of crime with the sociologist's arbitrary definition of harm
- Domestic law: Chambliss (1989) 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.
- However, using a state's own domestic law to define state crime is inadequate, it ignores the fact that states have the power to make laws and so they can avoid criminalising their own actions/ allow them to carry out harmful acts.
- Labelling and societal reaction: Labelling theory argues that wether an act constitutes a crime depends on whether the social audience for that act defines it as a crime.
- Labelling theory prevents sociologists imposing their own definition of state crime as this may not be how the participants defne the situation.
- However, Kauzlarich's (2007) study of anti-Iraq War protesters found that while they saw the war as harmful and illegitimate, they were unwilling to label it criminal. But if a 'harms' was used this could be seen as illegal.
- It also ignores the fact that audiences' definitions may be manipulated by ruling-class ideology.
- International law: Rothe and Mullins (2008) define a state crime as any action by or on behalf of a state that violates international law and/or a stste's own domestic law/
- The advantage of this is that is doesn't depend on the sociologist's personal definitions of harm or who the relevent audiance is. Its based on globally agreed definitions of state crime.
- However, international law is a social construction involving the use of power. Strand and Tuman (2012) found that Japan has sought to overturn the international ban on whaling by concerntrating its foreign aid on impoverished 'microstates', inclduing 6 small Caribbean island nations, to bribe them to vote against the ban.
- Another limitation is that international law focuses largely on war crimes and crimes against humanity, rather than other crime such as corruption.
Human rights: these include:
- Natural rights that people have simply by existing, such as the right to free speech.
- Civil rights, such as the right to vote or to privacy.
- Herman and Schwendinger (1975) argue that we should define state crime as the violation of human rights by the state or its agents.
- Risse et al (1999) argue that one advantage of this definition is that virtually all states care about their human rights image because these rights are now global social norms.
- The Schwendingers argue that the sociologist's role should be to defend human rights, if necessary against the state's laws. Their view is an example of transgressive criminology since it goes beyond the traditional boundaries of criminology, which are defined by criminal law.
- However Cohen (1996; 2001) criticises Schwendingers' view, While gross violations of human rights, e.g., torture, are crimes, other acts, e.g., economic exploitation, aren't self-evidently criminal, even if we find them morally unacceptable.
- There are also some disagreements about what counts as a human right, some may not include freedom from hunger, while others would.
- Green and Ward (2012) argue that liberty isn't much use if people are too malnourished to exercise it.
Case studies of crime:
- McLaughlin (2012) identifies 4 different categories for state crime:
- Political crimes, for example corruption and censorship.
- Crimes by security and police forces, such as genocide, torture and disappearances of dissidents.
- Economic crimes, for example official violations of health and safety laws.
- Social and cultural crimes, such as institutional racism.
State-corporate crime:
- Kramer and Michalowski (1993) distinguish between 'state initiated' and 'state facilitated'
- The Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986 is an example of state-initiated crime. When states initiate, direct or approve corporate crimes.
- In this example, risky, negligent and cost-cutting decisions by NAS and the corporation Morton Thiokol led to the explosion that killed 7 astronauts 73 seconds after blast-off.
- The Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 is an example of state-facilitated corporate crime. When states fail to regulate and control corporate behaviour, making crime easier.
- The rig, leased by BP, exploded and sank, killing 11 workers and causing the largest accidental oil spill in history with major health, environmental and economic impacts.
War crimes:
- We can distinguish between 2 kinds of war-related crime:
- Illegal wars: Under international law, in all cases other than self-defence, war can only be declared by the UNSC. On this basis, many see the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of the 'war on terror' as illegal.
- Kramer and Michalowks (2005) argue that to justify their invasion of Iraq in 2003 as self-defence, the USA and the UK knowingly made the false claim that the Iraqis possessed weapons of mass destruction.
- Crimes committed during war or its aftermath: Kramer and Michalowks (2005) identified crimes such as torture of prisoners during the Iraq War. A US military inquiry into Abu Ghriab prison found numerous instances of 'sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses' of prisoners. 9 soldiers were convicted, the highest-ranking being staff sergeant.
Genocide in Rwanda:
- In 1994, Rwanda was the scene of 'the 20th century's fastest genocide'
- Rwanda became a Belgian colony in 1922 and the Belgians used the minority Tutsi to mediate their rule over the Hutu majority.
- The Hutus and Tutsis weren't separate ethnic groups, more like different social classes. But, the Belgians 'ethnicised' them, issuing them with racial identity cards, and educating them separately.
- Rwanda gained independence in 1962 and elections brought the majority of Hutus to power. By the 1990s, an escalating economic and political crisis led to a civil war.
- The genocide was triggered by the Tutsis shooting down the president's place. In 100 days, 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered, legitimate with dehumanising labels such as 'cockroaches'.
Explaining state crime
Crimes of obedience:
- State crimes are crimes of conformity as require obedience to a higher authority.
- Research suggets that many people are willing yo obey authrotiy even when it involved harming others. Sociologists arue that such actions are part of a role into which individuals are socialised.
- Green and Ward (2012) say that in order to overcome nhorms against the use of cruelty, individuals whoe become torturers often need to be re-socialised, trained and exposed to propegeande about 'the enemy'.
- Kelman and Hamilton (1989) identify 3 general features that produces crimes of obedience:
- Authorisation.
- Routinisation
- Dehumanisation
The authoritarian personality:
- Adorno et al (1950) identify an 'authoritarian personality' that includes a willingness to obey the order of superiors without question.
- They argue at the time of WW2, many Germans had authoritarian personality types due to the punitive disciplinarian socialisation patterns that were common at that time.
- Similarly, it's often thoughts that people who carry out torture and genocide must be psychopaths. But, research suggests that there is little psychological difference between them and 'normal people.
- Arendt's (2006) study of Nazi war criminal Eichmann showed him to be relatively normal and not particularly anti-Semetic.
- CASE STUDY - Milgram's experiement of obedience.
The culture of denial:
- Alvarez (2010) says, recent years have seen the growing impact of the international human rights movement, and this brings pressure to bear on states.
- As a result, Cohen (2006) argues, states now have to make a greater effort to conceal or justify their human rights crimes, or to re-label them as not crimes.
- Cohen is interested in the ways states do this, while dictatorships generally just flatly deny any human rights abuses, democratic states have to legitimate their actions in more complex ways.
- Their justifications follow a 3 stage spiral of state denial:
Stage 1. 'It didn't happen': e.g., the state claims there was no massacre.
Stage 2. 'If it did happen, ''it'' is something else': e.g., the state says it was self-defence, not murder.
Stage 3. 'Even if it is what you say it is, it's justified', e.g., to firght the 'war on terror'
Techniques of neutralisation: Cohen examines how states deny or justify their crimes, he shows how states use the same techniques as delinquents use to justify human rights violations:
- Denial of victim: They exaggerate; they're terrorists; they are used to violence; look what they do to each other'.
- Denial of the jury: We are the real victims, not them.
- Denial of responsibility: I was obeying orders, and doing my duty. Often used by policemen, death camp guards etc...
- Condemning the condemners: They are condemning us only because of their anti-Semitism, their hostility to Islam, and their racism.
- Appeal to higher loyalty: Self-righteous justifications that claim to be serving a higher cause, whether the nation, Zionism, Islam etc...
- These techniques don't deny that the event has occurred, rather, they seek to impose a different construction of the event from what might appear to be the case.
Modernity:
- Some say that the Holocaust represented a breakdown of modern civilisation and a revision to pre-modern barbarism. But Bauman (1989) takes the opposite view, it was key features of modern society that made it possible:
- A division of labour: Each person was responsible for just one small task, so no one felt personally responsible for the atrocity.
- Bureaucratization: normalised the killing by making it a repetitive, rule-governed and routine 'job'
- Instrumental rationality: where rational efficient methods are used to achieve a goal, regardless of what the goal is.
- Science and technology: from the railways transporting victims to the death camps, to the industrially produced gas used to kill them.
Evaluation:
- Not all genocides occur through a highly organised division of labour that allows participants to distance themsleves from the killing.
- Ideological functions are also important. Nazi ideology stressed a single, monolithic German racial identity that escluded minorities who were defined as inferior or sub-human. This meant they didn't need to be treated according to normal human standards.
- So, while the rational, modern division of labour may've supplied the means for the Holocaist, it was racist ideology that supplied the motivation to carry it out.
- Green and Ward (2012) argue state crime is perhaps the most serious form of crime for 2 reasons:
- The scale of state crime -
- Green and Wrad (2012) cite a figure of 262 million people murdered by governments during the 20th century.
- The state is the source of the law -
- Its power means that it can conceal its crimes, evade punishment for them, and even avoid defining its own actions as criminal in the first place.
- State crime undermines the CJS and public faith in it.
- States of all kinds have been guilty of crimes, but the principle of national sovereignty makes it difficult for external authorities to intervene.
Green crime
Evaluation:
- Green crime has helped to focus on the global ramifications of many illegal and legal actions.
- However, because of this very global concerns its hard to define they boundaries of right and wrong, and many argue that this whole debate is one of ethics, values and subjectivity.
Green criminology:
- A01:
- Takes a more radical approach than ‘harm’ being done.
- As different countries have different laws Green criminology has to overstep these boundaries – referred to as ‘transgressive’ criminology.
- Green criminology adopts a global perspective to the environment.
- Similar to Marxist approaches it looks at powerful groups in the world and how often unacceptable practices are defended as legitimate actions.
- A02:
- White (2008) argues that the proper subject of criminology is any action that harms the physical environment and/or the human and animals within it.
- A03:
- Sheffield council hired Amey, to construct the roads which led to chopping down a lot of trees.
Traditional criminology:
- A01:
- Looks at criminal law to see if any have been broken.
- However, this approach is criticised for accepting too readily the ‘official definitions’ sponsored by big business and interest groups that do a lot of damage.
- A02:
- Situ and Emmons (2000) define environmental crime as an unauthorised act or omission that violates the law.
- A03:
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Anthropocentrism Vs Ecocentricism, White (2008):
- Says that there is a conflict between 2 key approaches:
- The anthropocentric view: states that mankind has the right to dominate nature for its own ends.
- The ecocentric view: sees humans and their environment as interdependent.
- Harming the environment harms humans!
Green crime:
- A01:
- This is essentially a crime against the environment and can be very subjective.
- This is because we can no longer think and do things as separate countries because we all share the same globe and all the bits are interconnected.
- Pollution from factories in one country affect the rain falling in another etc…
- A03:
- In 2009, more than 23,000 litres of oil had spilt and nearly 40 acres of mangrove forest burned, poisoning the land and fishponds that were the lifeblood of the village.
- Land of fires in Italy
What are the effects of deforestation in the Amazon?
- Nutrient cycle
- Climate change
- Indigenous people
- Soil erosion
- Water pollution
- Loss of Bio-diversity.
Types of green crime (South):
- Primary:
- Water pollution: contaminated drinking water, marine pollution, toxic dumping, and untreated sewage.
- Air pollution: burning fossil fuels, carbon emissions = global warning.
- Governments big businesses and ourselves are consumers can all be considered criminals.
- Species decline: many species are becoming extinct. Illegal trafficking in animals and parts is increasing.
- Deforestation: cleaning the rainforests has had a big effect on the world’s ecosystem. Criminals here are loggers, governments, and other big organisations.
- Secondary:
- In 1985 Greenpeace ship ‘rainbow Warrior’ was blown up in New Zealand by the French Secret Service.
- Governments oppose terrorism but will resort to it to protect their interests.
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