NCJ Number
230909
Editor(s)
William J. Chambliss,
Raymond Michalowski,
Ronald C. Kramer
Date Published
2010
Length
320 pages
Annotation
The sixteen chapters of this book examine the contemporary problems of "state crime" in order to provide a catalog of domestic and international state crimes as well as a framework for the study of state crime and potential ways of controlling it.
Abstract
The chapters are divided into three sections entitled "Framing State Crime," "The Brutal Realities of State Crime," and "Responding to State Crime." The four chapters of Part One address how to theorize about state crime. The goal of these chapters is to raise questions about the possibility of expanding the study of state crime in the contemporary global age. This requires going beyond the more common focus on relatively small-scale offenses of corrupt politicians to larger scale state crimes that impact those subject to the state's power to investigate, arrest, prosecute, sentence, and confine those it deems subject to its power. The seven chapters of Part Two explore five international and two domestic varieties of state crime. Three of the internationally focused articles concern war. One addresses the United States' management of the transition in Iraq, and another provides perspective on China's aid policy toward Africa's economically weakened states. Two chapters on domestic state crime examine whether wrongly convicted persons and persons "overcharged" by prosecutors are victims of "state crime." The four chapters of Part Three address strategies for confronting state crime. Two chapters focus on the potential for emergent supra-national bodies and their attendant international legal processes intended to address heinous political crimes. The other two chapters exam the potential for harm-reduction policies to replace crime-suppression models as the basis for domestic and international justice. The Epilogue calls for the creation of a public criminology of state crime that will develop new ways of thinking about harm, crime, power, and criminology. 7 figures, 4 tables, approximately 640 references, and a subject index