Reviews
| Author | Jude McCulloch,Sanja Milivojevic |
| Published date | 01 December 2004 |
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.37.3.443 |
| Date | 01 December 2004 |
R E V I E W S
Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful: Scrutinizing
States and Corporations
Edited by Steve Tombs and David Whyte
(2003) Peter Lang: New York, 318 pp., ISBN 0820456918
Deviant Knowledge: Criminology, Politics and Policy
By Reece Walters
(2003) Willan: Devon, UK, 218 pp., ISBN 1843920298
This review essay considers two books that confront the relaxed and
comfortable1 heartland of criminology with the uncomfortable reality that our
discipline largely ignores the crimes of the powerful — despite the repeated but
token acknowledgment that they are responsible for far more harm and human
suffering than criminology’s usual suspects. Tombs and Whyte point out in
Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful: Scrutinizing States and Corporations that
[r]esearch conducted within the discipline of criminology has historically sidelined
the study of corporate and state illegalities, a myopia that has remained even in the
face of overwhelming evidence that, in both in Britain and in the USA the social
and economic impact of corporate and state crimes upon their victims massively
exceeds the corresponding impact of conventional crimes (p. 4).
Walters similarly argues in Deviant Knowledge: Criminology, Politics and Policy that
“criminological discourses have, thus far, been dominated by a self serving or state-
serving noise of narrowly defined notions of crime and criminality” (p. 5). Both
books argue that the “growing assimilation of the universities into the neo-liberal
project” (Tombs & Whyte, 2003, p. 22) and the erosion of the democratic space
under the war on terror produce additional incentives to conform to dominant
paradigms surrounding crime and higher barriers to the production of “deviant”
knowledge which challenges existing power relations. Tombs and Whyte present a
collection of research that exposes crimes committed by states and corporations.
Walters’s book focuses on the experiences of criminologists negotiating the changes
wrought by “market-led criminology”, and champions the cause of critical and
reflexive criminology that acknowledges the links between knowledge and power
and resists dominant discourses.
Acquiescing to “common sense” notions of crime and criminals aids and abets
the crimes of the powerful and serves up scapegoats low on the social hierarchy. In
Australia, for example, the process of criminalisation of Aboriginal and Torres
Straight Islander people through denial of human rights and massively dispropor-
tionate arrest and incarceration, along with the failure to identify the state as
perpetrator of theft of land and genocide “ensures that Indigenous people are
maintained as a dispossessed minority, rather [than] a people with legitimate politi-
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
443
VOLUME 37 NUMBER 3 2004 PP. 443–452
Crim 37.3-text-final 10/1/04 4:09 PM Page 444
REVIEWS
cal claims on the nation state” (Cunneen, 2001, p. 250). The Australian govern-
ment’s construction of asylum-seekers that arrive by boat as “illegals” likewise elides
state crime perpetrated through military repulsion, mandatory detention and the
“Pacific Solution” (Marr & Wilkinson, 2003; Bessant, 2002).The criminalisation of
African American people in the United States is directly connected to, and assists
in, covering up the crime of slavery (Davis, 2003). In the context of the war on
terror, states left unchallenged have absolute power to define their enemies as
terrorist no matter how absurd the definition, and to label state atrocities as
counterterrorist no matter the extent of the terror and destruction wrought (see for
example Herman, 1993; Hocking, 2004). Conservative politicians need to
manufacture fear and moral panic around security and law and order as a cover for
the harms of neo-liberalism (McCulloch, 2004). As Angela Davis writes, prison —
the logical end point of law and order politics —
functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, reliev-
ing us of thinking about real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners
are drawn in such disproportionate numbers … It relieves us of the responsibility of
seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by
racism, and increasingly global capitalism … The prison has become a black hole into
which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited (2003, p. 16).
The books Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful, an edited collection with a foreword
by Frank Pearce and an introduction and concluding chapter by the editors, and
Deviant Knowledge, a monograph, set themselves distinct but overlapping aims. Tombs
and Whyte’s book details the massive gap in criminology represented by the inatten-
tion to the crimes of the powerful, presents research that challenges this, explains the
structural factors that make this type of research both uniquely difficult and uniquely
important, and illustrates and maps strategies for overcoming these impediments. The
editors are unconcerned with definitional issues, arguing that the ad nauseam debates
over what constitutes corporate and state crime have become an obstacle to substan-
tive work (p. 9). In any case, the chapters effectively do the talking, each scrutinising
the state or corporations, explicitly or implicitly defining them and the nature of
their power. Walters’s book aims
to open up for debate the various ways in which criminological knowledges are
governed; to explore the political dimensions in the production and consumption of
criminological research; to ask why and how criminological research is governed; and
to address […] the potential dangers inherent in those governing practices (p. 12).
The extended introduction in Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful convincingly
documents the dearth of published work on corporate and state crime and sets out
the consequences. One is that “methods for researching powerful corporations and
states are grossly underdeveloped … and there is very little experience for future
researchers to draw upon …”(p. 7). The aims of the book include assisting in devel-
oping methods for researching crimes of the powerful to “illuminate not only the
contexts of those crimes, but also the ways in which states and corporations subtly
(and not so subtly) evade scrutiny”. The editors believe that in this way “we can
learn much about how power is maintained, how resistance to power is neutralised,
and...
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