1. Dr. Cathy Gormley-Heenan School of Policy Studies January 2009
State Crime
Dr. Cathy Gormley-Heenan
School of Policy Studies
January 2009

2. In this module we will look at genocide, such as this in Rwanda.

3. We’ll look at torture like this from Abu Ghraib

4. And also war crimes in Bosnia…
July 1996, Pilica, Bosnia: Forensic experts from the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague work on a pile of partly decomposed bodies found in a mass grave

5. And we’ll also consider state-corporate crimes, and corruption in government .

6. Finally, we will look at mechanism for controlling ‘state crimes’, such as International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague….

7. Introduction
Conventional criminology often ignores the problems of crimes committed by the state.
The 2002 book Oxford Handbook of Criminology has 1 page out of on state crime.
Have a look - how many does Tim Newburn’s Criminology book have?
The big question is why is there a focus on crimes of the ‘powerless’ rather than the crimes of the ‘powerful’?

8. The reality is that …
Most of the serious crime, and the most serious crimes, are committed by the state.
Often remains ‘invisible’ because much of it is never named as a ‘crime’.
There is a tendency to define crime as whatever it is that the government defines legally as criminal.
We can, in this class, look not just at criminal law but also human rights law and international law to give us an OBJECTIVE basis to say what is state crime – and what is not!

9. So what is a state crime? State sponsored mass-murder or genocide
1.3 million people killed in Pol Pot’s Cambodia in
Disappearance of 90,000 Argentineans in late 1970s
250,000 Ugandans killed by Idi Amin’s government in 1970s.
1 million Hutus in Rwanda between

10. The use of famine as an instrument of state violence?
Political terror against citizens (unjust imprisonment, forced labour, espionage, harassment, torture)
Other things?
Next week, we will begin by looking at definitions of state crime….

11. Questions to consider
Why have so many criminologists overlooked state crime?
Why are crimes of the state so difficult for conventional criminology to deal with.
What does this tell us about the different constructive schemes at work in mainstream criminology?
READ Rothe, D.L. and Ross J.I., (2008) ‘The Marginalization of State Crime in Introductory Textbooks on Criminology’, Critical Sociology 34(5)