The State of the Criminology of Crimes of the State

Abstract

Introduction THE FIRST DECADE OF THE 21ST CENTURY IS AN ESPECIALLY APPROPRIATE TIME AND venue for addressing the state of the criminology of crimes of the state. One need only watch the international news, or visit international governmental or nongovernmental web sites to grasp the amount of state crime that is occurring around the world (e.g., Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Israel, the United States, Russia, North Vietnam, etc.). Despite the significant number of state crimes committed in recent years, most criminologists worldwide continue to focus on conventional forms of crime, efforts to prevent such crime, and the criminal justice system response to traditional street crime. Surely we have much to learn from each other's experiences with, and research on, such forms of crime and their control. However, it is more important for criminologists to increase the focus on transnational and non-conventional forms of crime, international institutions of control, and the challenges in addressing such crime. Indeed, transnational forms of terrorism, organized crime (especially that involving drugs), corporate crime, and computer crime have received increasing attention from criminological researchers. Transnational forms of policing also receive some attention, as do other transnational issues, such as democratization, trust, and civil society, and crime in relation to human development. However, governmental crime--or crime carried out in a governmental context--receives significantly less attention. Although many forms of governmental crime have an internal focus--i.e., they primarily victimize various constituencies within their own borders--many other forms of state crime either cross borders, or have a measurable transnational impact in various ways. For more than a decade in the United States, a widely diffused story has been declining rates of conventional crime--or the leveling off of such crime. There may be reason to believe that the constraint of many conventional forms of crime in the future will be increasingly successful. The challenges of successfully addressing crimes of states, however, are far greater and more complex, and such crimes will continue to have far more devastating consequences than those associated with conventional forms of crime. Historical assessments have often highlighted the immense impact of crimes of the state during the course of the 20th century, with the crimes of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China being especially large-scale and dramatic cases. Early in the 21st century, crimes of the state--and the prospect of crimes of the state involving weapons of mass destruction--are an especially conspicuous element of the contemporary historical environment. For instance, alleged state support of terrorists led to the invasion of Afghanistan under the Taliban, and alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and the intent to use them led to the U.S. invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Other countries--e.g., Iran and North Korea--inspired similar concerns in the United States and among some of its allies. Conversely, the perception in many countries of the United States as a criminal state intensified due to the policies of the George W. Bush administration, and Israel was also viewed as a criminal state by many people in the Arab world and those who sympathized with the Palestinian cause. The last years of the 20th century were also marked by major new initiatives to bring perpetrators of crimes of the state to trial, including tribunals focusing on genocidal actions in Bosnia and Rwanda, and the establishment of the Permanent International Criminal Court (Mullins, Kauzlarich, and Rothe, 2004; Rothe, 2004; Rothe and Mullins, 2006). All of these matters have generated voluminous commentary, but far too few criminologists have contributed to this discourse. This should not be the case. Our objective here is to survey the present state of the criminology of crimes of the state, to identify a potential agenda to advance this criminological enterprise, to promote the visibility of a somewhat marginalized criminological specialty, to foster further contacts between criminologists in different parts of the world who are interested in the study of crimes of the state, and to intensify transnational dialogue on some of the key issues in this realm. …