Reviews
| Date | 01 April 2005 |
| Published date | 01 April 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.38.1.148 |
| Subject Matter | Reviews |
148 THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME 38 NUMBER 1 2005 PP.148–163
REVIEWS
State Crime:
Governments, Violence and Corruption
By Penny Green and Tony Ward
(2004) London: Pluto Press,255 pp, ISBN 0745317847
Penny Green and Tony Ward’s book makes a seminal contribution to the discipline
and one that will no doubt be of enduring significance. While there have been a
number of criminologists who have done pioneering work on state crime — and these
are acknowledged in the book’s preface — the discipline as a whole has sidelined the
study of state illegalities in favour of a ‘state-serving noise of narrowly defined notions
of crime and criminality’ (Walters, 2003, p. 5). State crime has remained outside the
concern of mainstream criminology despite overwhelming evidence that harms
caused by these crimes eclipse the impact of conventional crime (Tombs & Whyte,
2003, p. 4). Green and Ward quote ‘mid-range’ estimates of 169 million people
murdered by government from 1900 to 1987, excluding deaths in wars, judicial execu-
tions and killings of armed opponents or criminals. In addition, states make a signifi-
cant contribution to property crime through both the relatively petty but widespread
corruption of government officials and the ‘grand’ corruption of political elites (p. 1).
State Crime is a book about ‘crimes committed by, or with the complicity of, govern-
ments and government agents’ and therefore ‘about most of the serious crime, and the
most serious of crimes, in the modern world’ (vii).
The book’s contribution is unique and significant on a number of levels. The
authors formulate an elegantly simple and practical definition of state crime as ‘state
organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights’ (p. 2). The first
chapter explains the three concepts — the state, organisational deviance and
human rights — involved in the definition. Defining state crime is at the heart of
any study of the state as criminal because ‘[i]f states define what is criminal, a state
can only be criminal on those rare occasions when it denounces itself for breaking
its own laws’. The authors speculate that this is perhaps why criminology has ‘never
regarded state crime as an integral part of its subject-matter’ (p. 1). Tombs and
Whyte in their recent edited collection, Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful:
Scrutinizing States and Corporations, argue that ‘ad nauseam’ debates over what
constitutes state crime have become an obstacle to substantive work (2003, p.
9).That the Green and Ward definition provides no such obstacle is convincingly
demonstrated in its application to diverse types of state crimes and illustrative case
studies throughout the book.
The book draws on a vast range of disciplines and theoretical perspectives to
explore the dynamics of some of ‘the most salient forms of state crime’, ranging —
in what I read as a type of hierarchy of horrors — from ‘Corruption as State Crime’,
‘State-Corporate Crime’, ‘Natural Disasters as State Crime’, Police Crime’,
‘Organised Crime and the Deep State’, ‘State Terror and Terrorism’, ‘Torture’, ‘War
Crimes’ to, finally, ‘Genocide’. With the exception of police crime, criminologists
have been largely or entirely missing in action in relation to each of these subjects.
However, there is nevertheless a vast amount written about state crime — without
it usually being named as such (p. 10). One of the book’s contributions is to synthe-
sise these vast and various literatures, integrate them with relevant criminological
literature and contextualise them in a state crime framework. The authors set out to
‘avoid the marked bias of the existing criminological literature on state crime
towards exposes of wrongdoing in advanced democracies, without veering too far in
the other direction and suggesting that poor or authoritarian states have a monop-
oly over crime’ (10). They succeed in this by presenting examples and case studies
from advanced industrialised democracies — the United States, the United
Kingdom, Japan, and so on; developing and transitional states such as Honduras,
Turkey, Kazakhstan and Bangladesh; ‘predatory states’ such as FARC in Columbia;
and state capitalist states, the preeminent contemporary example being China.
The book’s well-rounded approach in relation to the examination of different
types of states is matched by the in-depth exploration of the intersection between
state organisational goals and individual motivation. This approach illuminates the
often lethal ‘interplay between rational political calculation and the irrational or
emotional process that such calculation may set in train’ (p. 123). After mapping
the contours of the subject, each chapter explores the dynamic between motiva-
tions at the organisational and individual level through examples and case studies
from various locations and eras.
The chapter on torture is particularly timely and important given the revela-
tions of torture by United States forces at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In the intro-
duction to this chapter, under the heading ‘mapping torture’, the authors observe
that torture is not confined to a small number of particularly brutal regimes but is
documented in nearly half of the world’s states, including First World democracies
such as the United States, Israel and the United Kingdom (p. 124). The section
‘explaining torture’ summarises the various theoretical approaches from political
economy and structural explanations through to sociocultural/humanist. The analy-
sis of these literatures reveals that torture is ‘effective, not in extracting confessions
so much as in silencing opposition’ (p. 129); and that torture ‘is not an aberrant
strategy or punishment employed by individual rogue agents’, but ‘needs to be
understood as part of a process of control through terror’ (p. 132). The chapter
continues under the headings of ‘political economy and the role of US and EU
foreign policy’, ‘techniques of neutralisation and other deceits’, ‘the tortured’ and
‘the torturers: perpetrators’, ‘torturers: traders and trainers’, and ‘torturing states and
international law’. Although written before the photographs of prisoner abuse at
Abu Ghraib surfaced, the chapter anticipates these events. After referring to the
US treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere it argues that ‘the
devaluation of a section of the community (manifest in ‘Islamaphobia’) and the
clear identification of an enemy — the ‘axis of evil’— contribute to the structural
conditions conducive to torture (p. 146). The analysis reveals as a lie the morally
repugnant stance — currently gaining some legitimacy — that torture can amount
to the ‘lesser evil’ in the ‘war against terror’ (Ignatieff, p. 2004).
The chapter ‘Natural Disaster as State Crime’, most notably of all the chapters,
leads criminology into new and unchartered territory. Although the idea of state
responsibility for natural disasters is not entirely novel it is not a proposition that
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REVIEWS
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
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