State Crime in the Global Age

William J. Chambliss, Raymond Michalowski, Ronald Kramer, William J. Chambliss, Raymond Michalowski, Ronald Kramer

• Editorial: Willan
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134025626
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Kriminologie

State Crime in the Global Age brings together original writings from leading scholars in the field to explore the many ways that the use and abuse of state power results in grave social harms that outweigh, by far, the consequences of ordinary street crime.

The topics covered include the crimes of empire, illegal war, the bombing of civilians, state sanctioned torture, state sacrifice of human lives, and judicial wrongdoing. The book breaks new ground through its examination of the ways globalization has intensified potentials for state crime, as well as bringing novel theoretical understandings of the state to the study of state crime, and exploring strategies for confronting state crime.

This book, while containing much that is of interest to scholars of state crime, is designed to be accessible to students and others who are concerned with the ways individuals, social groups, and whole nations are victimized by the misuse of state power.

Chapter 1

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Introduction

Raymond Michalowski, William J. Chambliss and Ronald C. Kramer

Criminology has managed the astonishing feat of separating the study of crime from the contemplation of the state.

Stanley Cohen, Against Criminology

Since its inception, the discipline of criminology has served as an extension of state power. While this is obviously true for applied criminological research undertaken directly by or in service to government agencies, it is equally true for most basic research in criminology done in university settings or private research firms. Although, in liberal democratic societies, these organizations are presumably part of civil society, the line that separates civil society from the state is often much thinner than it is presumed to be. To the extent that criminological inquiry defines its primary subject matter as the causes and control of behaviors that states have selected for criminalization, it becomes part of the ‘ideological apparatuses’ whose functions are to promote and preserve the legitimacy of state power (Althusser 1971). Or, as Foucault (1977) would have it, criminological knowledge, like all state-approved knowledge, is an artifact of power.

As part of the power-knowledge apparatus of modern states, criminology has always had a difficult time addressing harmful actions that fall outside the narrow range of wrongdoings selected by states’ condemnation. This is particularly evident when the wrongful acts in question are committed by states themselves.

Wrongdoing in the state arena can be divided, most broadly, into crimes against the state and crimes by the state. Crimes in the first category, such as treason, sedition, theft of government property or terrorism, are soundly condemned and severely punished. Equally or more injurious actions such as torture, aggressive war or political repression committed in the service of state goals are typically either not criminalized by the offender state, or if criminalized, typically investigated and/or prosecuted only after they have served their purpose or failed to advance state interests. A case in point would be the 2009 decision by the Obama Department of Justice (Johnson 2009) to establish a special prosecutor to investigate potential criminal acts of torture committed during the CIA interrogation of suspected terrorists, more than five years after evidence of these crimes had become widespread (Welch 2009).

Even if we limit the definition of state crime to the less problematic category of legally designated crimes against the state, criminological inattention to state crime is notable. Legacy criminology journals in the United States such as Criminology, Justice Quarterly and Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency are dense with articles about juvenile delinquents, drug users, murderers and thieves, or about the policies and systems designed to control them. Articles addressing prosecutable state crimes, by contrast, are rare, and criminological inquiry into wrongful but legal acts in service of state interests are almost totally absent. In those instances where wrongful state actions have received attention from US orthodox criminologists, the focus has typically been on crimes of foreign governments, such as the current criminological interest in the crime of genocide (Hagan et al. 2005).

Even though criminology emerged as a separate discipline, with its own professional associations such as the American Society of Criminology and the British Society of Criminology, in the decade after the Nuremberg trials ended, and as we detail in the epilogue an important American criminologist played a central role in these prosecutions, there are no canonical works in criminology focusing on war crimes. This is clear testimony that states and their crimes were not part of the founding consciousness of the discipline. Simply put, the criminological canon excludes from its catalogue of concerns most harms against human, animal and environmental well-being committed by states.

Whether democratic or authoritarian, capitalist or communist, every modern state has generated criminological practices whose core theories and research ‘findings’ validate the vision of social reality favored by political-economic elites (Chambliss 1969; Michalowski 1985; Quinney 1970, 1977). Such practices legitimate the foundational consciousness of the political order in which it operates, dividing injurious actions and actors into the ‘dangerous’ and the acceptable (Renee 1978).

This reproduction of dominant consciousness frequently occurs even in cases where criminological inquiry calls into question specific governmental practices. In recent years, for instance, many criminologists have questioned government claims that long, mandatory prison sentences are an effective tool in the longstanding US ‘war on drugs’ (Austin and Irwin 2001). Few of these critical inquiries, however, question the origin or broader implications of the claim that the state has, and ought to have, the right to determine what substances humans can willingly allow into their bodies. Yet this assumption is a prime example of what Foucault (1998: 140) calls ‘biopower’, that is, ‘numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations’ (1998: 140). Developed as an essential part of the eighteenth-century formation of capitalist political-economies, the right of states to designate legitimate and illegitimate consumption remains dimly and safely lodged in the past, beyond the consciousness of criminologists concerned primarily with whether or not contemporary drug policies are good or bad. Nor do most criminologists concerned with excessively punitive drug laws directly question the right of the state to inflict pain on some people to avoid law violation by others. This right was born with the emergence of utilitarianism as core justification for the state in market society, and like the public health authority of the state, operates as a typically unquestioned background assumption of modern state policy (Polanyi 1944/2001: 124–6). Thus, the state’s right to discipline our bodies in the most intimate ways by controlling what we eat, smoke or inject, along with the deterrent logic of the penal state, remains unquestioned, even as those seeking a more sensible drug policy chip away at a particular application of state power.

Questioning whether a particular use of state power is effective is far less troubling to an established order than inquiring into the nature of that power in the first instance. Inquiry into the assumptions underlying state power often reveal that which state managers would prefer to remain in the shadows — that the benefits derived from the application of state power typically advance specific group interests and harm others, rather than serving the ‘public good’ that is the presumed basis of state legitimacy. For instance, while many orthodox criminologists study why people willingly consume drugs defined as illegal by the state, few study how state law facilitates and in some cases even promotes corporate actions that subject tens of millions of people in the United States and around the world to unwanted daily doses of cancer-causing chemicals and other environmental pollutants (Burns and Lynch 2004; Lynch and Stretesky 2001).

Criminology’s near exclusive attention to state-defined crimes is not the result of intellectual or moral failings on the part of criminologists. The problem is much deeper. It resides in the contradiction inherent in joining the terms ‘social’ and ‘science’ into the concept of ‘social science’. The dominant idea of ‘science’, as constructed during the period between 1500 and 1800 CE known as the Enlightenment, holds that analytic inquiry must separate itself from religious beliefs and moral preferences in order to clearly recognize the underlying laws of nature that explain the natural world (Gray 1996). For late medieval and early Renaissance scientists, there was no notion that this scientific model could or should be applied to the world of human behavior. Human actions remained rooted in the theological struggle between good and evil, between moral and immoral action, even if those roots were beginning to weaken. By the early 1700s the rise of the mercantile, capitalist state and the death of rule by divine right required a new justification for state power. The solution was found in the emergent philosophy of utilitarianism, which located both morality and the motivations for human behavior in the natural rather than the metaphysical world — in what Bentham (1780/1973) called ‘the twin principles of pleasure and pain’.

A powerful blow to the understanding of human inquiry as moral inquiry came with the 1859 publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Darwin and other evolutionary theorists lodged human beings firmly in the world of animals, not the world of angels and devils. As animals responding to laws of nature, humans could be studied with the epistemological tools heretofore reserved primarily for the study of the natural world (Morrison 1995). Thus emerged a new epistemology of social inquiry that saw the human world as governed by social laws of nature just as the physical world was governed by material laws.

One important prescription resulting from the application of the epistemology of natural science to social inquiry is that to be ‘scientific’, social inquiry must be devoid of moral judgments. This became a potent barrier to criminological inquiry into state crime. The laws made by government are not the consequence of natural forces. They are, at their historical root, statements of the moral preferences of some versus those of others.¹ Consider the laws governing illegal drug use or the laws of theft. In both cases these laws displaced a set of previous cultural and political practices that in the first instance left what people consumed entirely up to them, and in the second instance left the problem of theft in the realm of personal matters to be resolved by individuals not the state (Duster 1970; Hall 1952). Moreover, these changes reflected specific political goals rather than some interest-neutral pursuit of social order (Diamond 1979). Nevertheless, because the passage of time rather quickly buries these interests beneath the weight of established practices, most state law takes on qualities of naturalness and neutrality. To question why state laws are what they are unavoidably locates the researcher in an arena of moral considerations where it is impossible to avoid moral preference. Despite claims to scientific neutrality, inquiry into the nature of state law reveals that any criminological orientation that accepts only those acts that states have decided to criminalize as appropriate topics of inquiry is itself the expression of moral preference.

An epistemology of social science that requires moral detachment from the subject matter being studied is an illusion. Humans studying rocks, plants, fish or quarks inhabit a moral space that differs from that of humans studying other humans. Human beings, as the twentieth-century philosopher and economist Robert Heilbroner (1974) points out, always occupy a moral standpoint relative to other humans, including those they approach as research subjects. Criminologists studying methamphetamine users, for instance, occupy a moral space in which the behavior of the drug users in question is accepted as problematic and therefore eligible for discipline by the state. This is no less a moral preference than a criminologist who elects to study the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 as a state crime. The only difference is that the drug use in question is condemned by the state, while the war and all its grave harms are not. In short, states and their harmful actions, whether or not those harmful actions are legally defined as crimes, are legitimate and important topics of criminological inquiry.

Beyond normal science

In contrast to orthodox criminology’s almost exclusive focus on working-class crime, this volume foregrounds inquiries into crimes and social injuries of state power regardless of their status under law. In doing so it seeks not only to provide analyses of specific state crimes, but also to fracture the normal science, state-oriented consciousness that has rendered criminology a politically captive enterprise since its emergence in the early twentieth century. This book is certainly not the first effort to do so. Since the late 1960s, in Britain, Europe and the United States various schools of thought within criminology have challenged the field’s routine acceptance of state definitions of crime. The ‘new criminology’, ‘radical criminology’, ‘critical criminology’, ‘feminist criminology’, ‘cultural criminology’ and ‘anarchist criminology’ have all sought to challenge the dominant state-centric paradigm, and in various ways have contributed to the contemporary critique of states and their crimes (Ross 2009).

The roots of this intellectual movement reach back to the general social upheavals of the 1960s and the early application of symbolic interaction and its offspring, labeling theory and social constructionism, to the problems of law, crime and justice (Becker 1963; Chambliss 1964, 1969; Lemert 1972; Platt 1969; Quinney 1970; Schur 1971; Taylor el al. 1974). Although not specifically concerned with state crime, these early critical analysts challenged the apparent ontology of crime, revealing crime as a social product of political choice and human interaction, not an immutable fact. This opening, fueled by the growing struggles for civil rights and against the US war in Vietnam, prompted a growing recognition that any meaningful analysis of law, crime and justice required analytic attention to be given to the nature and use of power, particularly the political power of the state (Chambliss 1974; Michalowski and Bohlander 1976; Pearce 1976; Platt 1978; Quinney 1974, 1977; Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1970; Takagi 1981; Tifft and Sullivan 1980).

Informed by a new wave of post-McCarthy Marxism in the academy, these inquiries analyzed the role of political-economic arrangements in creating the definitions of crime, framing the practice of justice, and facilitating the social conditions that generated the working-class crimes and urban social unrest that threatened to embarrass the capitalist state’s promise that it could deliver social peace.

To use Cohen’s (1988) term, each of these ‘anti-criminologies’ offered valuable insights into the relationship between power, knowledge and the definition of what is crime and who is the criminal. However, to some extent these critical approaches constituted a type of counterculture within criminology. Like other countercultures, much of what came to fit under the broad umbrella of critical criminology was shaped by the culture it sought to counter (Roszak 1969). As a result, the bulk of critical inquiry in criminology continues to focus on the same subsets of crime that hold the attention of more orthodox inquiries — street crimes against property or persons, drug use, domestic violence, and youth deviance involving gangs, graffiti and guns. The result has been a kind of critical orthodoxy devoted to building critiques of and offering alternatives to orthodox approaches to the causes and control of crimes characteristic of less advantaged rather than more advantaged sectors of society. Crimes committed by powerful actors in the world of governments and corporations have played very much a secondary role in critical criminology, just as they have been a secondary concern of orthodox criminology. The result is that even though orthodox and critical criminology frequently ask different questions, they tend to ask them about the same people and the same crimes.

While ordinary criminal law and the routine practices of criminal justice systems have been examined by critical criminologists, the state qua state has received relatively little theoretical attention. In some instances critiques of state practices are part of a framework of thought that sees the state as the solution as well as the cause of problems. The goal is often to ‘correct’ the state by creating better laws and more humane enforcement strategies. Thus, more punishment for domestic abusers and less for marijuana users; more punishment for those who use ‘hate’ speech and less for juvenile lawbreakers; these are common themes in contemporary critical criminology (Bohm 1993). While pursuing more humane and just state policies is a worthwhile endeavor, doing so needs to be more closely coupled with theoretical analysis of the state that is supposed to serve as the vehicle for rectifying harms for which the state, either through commission or omission, is often responsible.

As long as critical criminology remains largely focused on whether the state is governing the masses through appropriate definitions and prosecutions of interpersonal crimes against individuals or their property, the powerful who operate in a sphere largely separate from the controlled multitude disappear from view, except on those rare occasions when they too commit some ordinary crime.

Because of its focus on expanding the critique of class, race and gender inequities embedded in the capitalist justice systems, critical inquiry in criminology did not initially generate an explicit model of state crime. It did, however, drop a number of breadcrumbs leading in that direction. The intersection of the early insights of radical and critical criminology, together with the cumulative weight of the Vietnam war, the revelations of Watergate, and US support for terrorist ‘national security states’ in Latin America and Africa, ultimately spurred a small but vibrant new concern with the criminal state among some critical criminologists (Frappier 1985; Huggins 1987; Michalowski and Kramer 1987; Pearce 1976; Quinney 1977; Tifft and Sullivan 1980). In this context of a new concern with governmental wrongdoing, Bill Chambliss (1989), in his American Society of Criminology presidential address, called for the study of ‘state-organized crime’, which he defined as ‘acts defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in the pursuit of their jobs as representatives of the state’. Chambliss’ address became a touchstone for criminologists concerned with either individuals who used state power illegally in service of state interests or the state itself as an organizational deviant. The understanding of state crime began to reach beyond state law to acts that violated international but not national laws, and those that did not specifically violate either, but were so grievous as to be necessarily part of any serious study of state criminality.² By the late twentieth century, the study of state crime had grown into a recognizable branch of critical criminological inquiry. Friedrichs (2010), Green and Ward (2004) and Rothe (2009) provide useful overviews of this process. This growth in interest in state crime has been fueled by four external forces: (1) the collapse of the Soviet bloc of nations and the emerge...