NCJ Number
154416
Editor(s)
J I Ross
Date Published
1995
Length
442 pages
Annotation
Fourteen papers examine issues pertinent to the nature and responses to crimes committed by governments and government agencies.
Abstract
Contributors include the views of well-respected scholars, experts, and activists in the field who represent different genders, nationalities, and racial, religious, and ethnic groups. The first paper presents an integrated structural model for controlling State crime. It notes that the biggest impediments to the study of controlling State crime are definitional, conceptual, theoretical, and methodological in nature, as well as lacking in the design of practical methods to abolish, combat, control, decrease, minimize, prevent, or resist this type of behavior. The papers represent the diversity of views on whether and how the notion of State crime should be used. One contributor argues that the concept of State crime is useless, because it is indiscriminately applied to anything objectionable to whomever uses the term. Some contributors attempt to devise a definition of State crime that is neither too indiscriminate nor too limiting. Most contributors discuss some putative form of State crime without much explicit attention to the definitional problem. Various papers analyze crimes of education, crimes against labor, or offensive conduct by military, police, or intelligence agencies. The common theme or assumption of these papers is that the harm is evident and avoidable and is the direct or indirect result of deliberate actions by government. In discussing the problems of controlling State crime, however defined, the contributors present a diversity of views. The anarchist conclusion is that reforming the State may be a more utopian notion than abolishing it. One contributor concludes that States cannot police themselves, and another observes that no State ever has been, or is likely to be, prosecuted under international law. The editor formulates a series of propositions that hypothesize the conditions under which control efforts at various levels are likely to be more or less successful.