COVID-19 and the U.S. Health Care Industry: Towards a “Critical Health Criminology” within State Crime Studies

David O Friedrichs,Valeria Vegh Weis

doi:10.13169/statecrime.10.1.0126

David O Friedrichs, Valeria Vegh Weis

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.13169/statecrime.10.1.0126

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Abstract

The core claim of this article is that critical criminology offers us an especially potent framework for interpreting state-corporate crime with the health care industry in the United States as one illustrative case, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. The unprecedented, surreal pandemic crisis that surfaced in 2020 brought into especially sharp relief many of the core claims of critical criminology in relation to domination, inequality and injustice within a contemporary capitalist political economy, while it also raised the need to broaden critical criminology studies to incorporate the specificities of the health care systems and the pharmaceutical industry. Following this challenge, the article proposes to foster a “critical health criminology” within state-corporate crime research. To do so, this article explores the “big picture” in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and reveals how it can be understood as a criminological phenomenon. Such a project incorporates the identification of some conceptual issues requiring attention in relation to advancing an enriched form of criminological analysis in these times, and toward building a foundation for a more fully realized twenty-first century criminology.

Highlights

Beyond the vast avalanche of journalistic reporting and commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, it has attracted the attention of biologists, epidemiologists, virologists, ecologists, historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists and academics and specialists from a broad range of contemporary disciplines and fields
In relation to a “big picture” prism, this article addresses the potential challenge of COVID-19 for criminology and on the potential of critical criminology as a platform to address the pandemic with a focus on what might be referred as “critical health criminology.”
How might deaths from COVID-19 be understood in relation to crime? what proportion of those who died was due principally, if not exclusively, to the negligent policies and practices of governmental and corporate leadership, from the president of the United States down? In May, 2020, the New York Times headlined a frontpage story with “Lockdown Delays Cost at Least 36,000 Lives, Data Suggest” (Glanz and Robertson 2020)

Summary

Introduction

Beyond the vast avalanche of journalistic reporting and commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, it has attracted the attention of biologists, epidemiologists, virologists, ecologists, historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists and academics and specialists from a broad range of contemporary disciplines and fields. Mainstream criminology takes the existing political and social status quo as a given and does not address this context in relation to crime and criminal justice.

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Conclusion