Criminogenic Policy as a Crime of the Powerful: A Case Study on NAFTA’s Negotiation Process

Abstract

State-corporate crime frameworks have typically been applied to crimes committed by a single state. In a globalizing world, multiple states are more likely than ever before to commit crime in collusion as evinced in the growing crimes of the powerful literature. Studying international policy formation offers one unique avenue for investigating social harms that may arise from policy or its consequential conditions. Using traditional state-corporate crime frameworks (Kramer and Michalowski in Michalowski, Kramer (eds.) State-corporate crime: wrongdoing at the intersection of business and government, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2006; Rothe and Mullins in Int J Comp Appl Crim Justice 33(1):97–118, 2009), the current research applies these frameworks to international policy formation by focusing on overlapping motivations, opportunities, and lax controls and constraints by multiple states, corporations, and other organizations involved in policy formation. Furthermore, the concept of a transnational capitalist class is integrated with this framework to better understand the connections between elites influencing policy. To demonstrate this novel approach, the current research is a case study of NAFTA’s negotiation process. It is argued that NAFTA was a criminogenic policy—an agreement that created conditions conducive for social harm—evinced by a North American transnational class that colluded to create a policy favorable to their motivations while neglecting, censoring, or even oppressing the opposition. The result was an exclusionary policy capable of producing social harm. Future criminologists should seek ways to detect criminogenic policies during formation and implement safeguards against them, and the current renegotiation of NAFTA is one place to start.