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Crime and Deviance - State Crime, human rights and war crimes (flashcards…

- - - - some argue that the invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power, broke international laws as they had not secured the agreement of the international community via the UN
  - - - the power of the state enables it to commit extremely large scale crimes with widespread victimisation
      - Example
        
        in Cambodia between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge government of Pol Pot is believed to have killed up to 2 million people
      - the principle of national sovereignty makes it very difficult for external forces to intervene.
    - - it is the state's role to define what is criminal and to manage the CJS and to prosecute offenders. Its power to create the law also means that it can avoid defining its own harmful actions as criminals.
    - - Schwendinger and Schwendinger x - suggest state crimes should be considered as violations of human rights
- - - - O'Byrne (2012) x
        
        states are increasingly assessed by the extent to which they preserve human rights. and by the extent to which they fail to do so through injustice, discrimination, torture, violence, slavery or genocide.
  - - - we should define state crimes as a violation of people's basic human rights by the state or its agents. States that practice racism, sexism or economic exploitation are committing crimes because they are denying people their basic human rights.
      - is we accept crimes are simply whatever the state says they are, we become subservient to their interests. Therefore, they take a transgressive view - beyond the traditional boundaries of criminology
    - - one advantage of the Schwendingers' definition is that virtually all states care about their human rights image, because these rights are now global social norms. This makes they susceptible to 'shaming' and this can provide leverage to make them respect their citizens' rights.
    - - while gross violations of human rights, such as torture, are clearly criminal, other acts, such as economic exploitation, are not self-evidently criminal, even if we find them morally unacceptable
      - there are also disagreements about what counts as human rights
- - - - in 1973 the democratically elected socialist leader of Chile was murdered by a CIA backed coup d'etat - USA wanted access to copper mines
    - - Rwanda Genocide 1994 - mass slaughter of Tutsi and moderate Hutu - 500k to 1 million killed
    - - Stephen Lawrence Report
  - - - under international law, wars are illegal is they are for anything other than self-defence
      - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were illegal wars - not sanction by the UN
    - - to justify their invasion of Iraq in 2003 as self-defence, the USA and UK knowingly made the false claim that the Iraqis possessed weapons of mass destruction
    - - the terror bombing of civilians has become 'normalised'.
  - - - when states initiate. direct or approve corporate crimes
      - Example - Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986 x
        
        risky, negligent and cost-cutting decisions by the state agency NASA and the corporation Morton Thiokol led to the explosion that killed 7 astronauts 73 seconds after blast-off
    - - when states fail to regulate and control corporate behaviour, making crime easier
      - Example - Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster 2010 x
        
        enquiry found that the disaster killing 11 workers, resulted from decisions by the companies involved, and government regulators had failed to oversee the industry adequately or to notice the companies' cost cutting decisions.
- - - - 'acts defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in pursuit for the jobs as representatives of the state'
      - Critique x
        
        ignores the fact that states have the power to make laws and can therefore avoid criminalising their behaviour
        
        they can make laws allowing them to carry out harmful acts
        
        also leads to inconsistencies - what is legal on one side of a border may be illegal on the other
  - - - including not just illegal acts but also' legally permissible acts whose consequences are similar to those of illegal acts' in the harm they cause
    - - we should replace the study of crimes with zemiology - the study of harms, whether or not they are against the law.
    - - creates a single standard that can be applied to different states
      - prevents the state from ruling themselves 'out of court' by making laws that allow them to behave badly
    - - what level of harm must occur before an act is defined as a crime? There is a danger that this definition makes the field of study too wide
      - who decides what counts as harm? this just replaces the state's arbitrary definition of crime with the sociologist's equally arbitrary definition of harm
  - - - Kauzlarich (2007) x - study of anti-Iraq War protestors found that while they saw the war as harmful and illegitimate, they were unwilling to label it criminal. By contrast, from a 'harms' perspective, the way can be seen as illegal.
      - it is also unclear who is supposed to be the relevant audience that decides whether a state crime has been committed, or what to do if different audiences reach different verdicts.
      - Marxist x - it ignores the fact that audiences' definitions may be manipulated by ruling class ideology. For example, the media may persuade the public to see a war as legitimate rather than criminal
  - - - define a state crime as any action by or on behalf of a state that violates international law and/or a state's own domestic law
    - - it does not depend on personal definitions of harm or who the relevant audience is. Instead it uses globally agreed definition of state crime
      - international law also had the advantage of being designed to deal with state crime, unlike domestic law
    - - like the laws made by individual state, international law is also a social construction involving the use of power
      - Strand and Tuman (2012) x - found that Japan has sought to overturn the international ban on whaling by concentrating its foreign aid on impoverished 'microstates', including six small Caribbean island nations, to bride them to vote against the ban
      - international law focuses largely on war crimes and crimes against humanity, rather than other crimes such as corruption
- - - - Arendt x - study of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann showed him to be relatively normal and not particularly anti-Semitic
      - sociologists argue that such actions are part of a role into which individuals are socialised. They focus on the social conditions in which such behaviour becomes acceptable or even required.
  - - - 1. Authorisation - when acts are ordered by those in authority, normal moral principles are replaced by the duty to obey
      - 2. Routinisation - once the crime has been committed, there is strong pressure to turn the act into routine which individuals can perform in a detached manner
      - 3. Dehumanisation - when the enemy is portrayed as subhuman rather than human and described as animals, monsters, etc. The usual principles of morality do not apply.
  - - - A division of labour - each person was responsible for one small task, so no-one felt personally responsible for the strocity
      - Bureaucratisation - normalised the killing by making it a repetitive and routine job
      - Instrumental rationality - rational, efficient methods were used to achieve a goal
      - Science and technology - trains used to transport and the gas used to kill
      - this detached mechanism of state-approved murder, the killing of a defined 'sub-human' group, was considered a routine job of carrying out a role applying scientific methods.
  - - - denial opf the victim
      - denial of unjury
      - denial of responsibility
      - condemning the condemners
      - appealing to higher loyality