Book Review: State Crime. Governments, violence and corruption
| Author | Steve Tombs |
| DOI | 10.1177/146247450500700114 |
| Published date | 01 January 2005 |
| Date | 01 January 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
on globalization, criminal justice policy transfer and the porosity of the penal periph-
ery to outside influences. Indeed it gives promise of a meaningful critique of how states
in transition are developing their own indigenous systems of justice based not only on
historical antecedents but also on a broad public consensus about how to make criminal
justice fair, democratic, transparent and accountable.
Justice, moreover, that reflects the local cultural, political and economic milieu has a
greater chance of progressive democratic accountability than a justice system that denies
the reality of local conditions and instead seeks approval, in universal terms, from
European nations that have a stronger grip (politically, economically, culturally). The
style and aims of this book, therefore, will be of special interest to those concerned with
how those societies identified as ‘failing’ (for example, nations in the Inner Asian realm,
Iraq and Afghanistan) might reform their justice systems and what might be their
reasons for doing so.
Reference
Priban, J. and J. Young (1999) The rule of law in central Europe: The reconstruction of
legality, constitutionalism and civil society in post-Communist countries. Aldershot:
Ashgate.
Laura Piacentini
University of Stirling, UK
State crime. Governments, violence and corruption, Penny Green and Tony Ward (eds).
London: Pluto Press, 2004. viii + 256 pp. £14.99. ISBN 074531784 7 (pbk).
As this text makes clear, state crime comes in many forms, is a universal phenomenon,
and has consequences of a scale, range and nature that are almost impossible to imagine,
simply off the register when compared with the crimes and incivilities that tend to
provide the focus for the vast majority of criminology and work of criminal justice
agencies. Environmental destruction, the displacement of peoples, ‘natural’ disasters,
deaths in custody, rape in war, the illegal arms trade, operations of drugs cartels, the
illegal funding of political campaigns, and both assassinations and mass killings spon-
sored by states are just some of the crimes which pervade these pages. The text is littered
with case studies illustrating the systemic nature of state murder, theft, destruction and
lies, from Afghanistan to Australia, Ghana to Guatemala, the UK to the US. Through
a complex inter-weaving of empirical and analytical material, the authors clearly deliver
on the early stated promise to ‘explore the dynamics of some of the most salient forms
of state crime, from corruption . . . to genocide’ (p. 10).
While it is a commonplace of positive reviews that the book in question cannot be
done justice to within the required word limit, the scale of the task taken on by the
authors here makes such an observation particularly apposite. For this is an empirically
dense book – a characteristic indicated by the span of its contents (corruption, state-
corporate crime, natural disasters, police crime, organized crime, state terror and terror-
ism, torture, war crimes and genocide) and certainly evidenced by a literally massive
bibliography, spanning 32 pages and recording, at an estimate, almost 1000 entries. Yet
nor is it merely a collection of tales of state crime (though, given the myopia of
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