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Book Review: State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorPete Fussey
DOI10.1177/0964663906066622
Published date01 September 2006
Date01 September 2006
Subject MatterArticles
08 Book Reviews (bc-t) 464
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 15(3)
PENNY GREEN AND TONY WARD, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corrup-
tion. London: Pluto, 2004, 264 pp., £14.99.
DOI: 10.1177/0964663906066622
This important and well-researched book opens by setting itself the task of examin-
ing crimes committed by, or with the complicity of, governments and government
agents. In the opening pages the scale of such actions – and hence the enormity of the
task – are startlingly laid out as we are informed that between 1900 and 1987, 169
million people have been murdered by governments (excluding those killed in wars).
In trying to make sense of such diverse activity – clearly outstripping the impact of
more ‘conventional’ crimes – the authors endeavour to assess state criminality in a
variety of contexts including corruption, corporate crimes, police crime, organized
crime, state terrorism, war crimes, torture and genocide. It is significant that this book
attempts to examine such phenomena through the lens of criminological enquiry. A
recent special issue of the British Journal of Criminology notwithstanding, the authors
rightly declare that ‘criminology as a discipline has never regarded state crime as an
integral part of its subject matter’. This is an important task and one in which the
authors acquit themselves well.
The book opens by undertaking the difficult task of developing a working defi-
nition of state crime and outlining its conceptual position. While acknowledging the
complexity of the endeavour, the authors formulate a definition of state crime as ‘state
organizational deviance involving the violation of human rights’ (p. 2). For Green and
Ward, this categorization of state crime as a form of organizational deviance allows
analysis through criminological staples such as deviance, motivation, opportunity
structures, control and labelling, which, it is argued ‘can be applied to organizations
just as well as to individuals’ (p. 5). Throughout the book a range of additional theor-
etical...

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