State Crime, Human Rights, And the Limits of Criminology

Author(s): Penny J. Green and Tony Ward

Source: Social Justice , Spring 2000, Vol. 27, No. 1 (79), Race, Class, and State Crime
(Spring 2000), pp. 101-115
Published by: Social Justice/Global Options

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29767193

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 State Crime, Human Rights,
And the Limits of Criminology

Penny J. Green and Tony Ward

THE AIM OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO SUGGEST HOW CRIMINOLOGY CAN REMEDY ITS
neglect of the important phenomenon of state crime, without adopting
such a broad definition of "crime" as to destroy what coherence criminol?
ogy has as a distinct field of study. To assess the universality of our approach we
employ examples from two different state traditions, Anglo-American and Turk?
ish. Our definition allows us to examine countries as diverse as Turkey and the
United Kingdom from the perspective of a continuum, rather than as two discrete,
incomparable state formations ? authoritarian and democratic.
One of our reasons for selecting Turkey as a comparative example is that it is
a democratizing state with an authoritarian historical backdrop. Torture of
detainees, extrajudicial killings and disappearances, violent public order policing,
forced evacuations, the razing of whole villages, and the routine harassment of
trade unionists, media workers, and human rights defenders form the human rights
landscape in much of Turkey (see Amnesty International, 1998; European
Commission, 1998; Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, 1997, 1998; Human
Rights Watch, 1999). Torture is, however, in breach of Article 17 of the Consti?
tution and Articles 243 and 245 of the penal code, and is punishable by up to five
years of imprisonment. Proposals documented in the new draft penal code are set
to increase the powers of the courts in punishing state officials found guilty of
torture and ill treatment of detainees. In some celebrated cases, state officials have
been charged with criminal conduct, but they are few and the crimes are many. In
1999, six police officers were sentenced to five and one-half years each for
torturing a suspect to death in 1993, but most other cases against state officials have
resulted in very lenient sentences, fines, or acquittals.

Penny J. Green is Professor of Law and Criminology at the School of Law, University of Westminster
(4 Little Titchfield Street, London, W1P 7FW England; e-mail: P.J.Green@westminster.ac.uk). Her
current research interests include Britain and the arms trade, drug trafficking, state crime, and human
rights and criminal justice in Turkey. Her published works include The Enemy Without: Policing and
Class Consciousness in the 1984-85 Miners' Strike (1990), Drug Couriers: An International
Perspective (1996), and Drugs Trafficking and Criminal Policy: The Scapegoat Strategy (1997). She
is currently working with Tony Ward on an edited volume entitled State Crime and the Limits of
Criminology. Tony Ward is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law, De Montfort University, The
Gateway, Leichester, LEI 9BH England. He formerly worked for INQUEST, which campaigns about
deaths in custody in England and Wales.

Social Justice Vol. 27, No. 1 (2000) 101

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 102 Green & Ward

The violence of the Turkish state is of a different order of magnitude to that

employed in most liberal democracies. Yet instances of violent crime by British
and American state officials are not difficult to find?recent revelations about the
Los Angeles Police Department, and allegations of brutality against officers at the
Wormwood Scrubs and Wandsworth prisons in England are among the more
obvious examples. Less well-publicized is the extent to which legally unjustifiable
violence is routinely used by police to enforce social discipline in some working
class areas (Choongh, 1997; Waddington, 1999).
Despite the arguments of some theorists (e.g., Giddens, 1985) to the contrary,
the use and threat of physical violence remain central to state power in liberal
democracies. Cover's remarks on American criminal trials bring this out vividly:

If convicted the defendant customarily walks?escorted?to prolonged

confinement, usually without significant disturbance to the civil appear?
ance of the event. It is, of course, grotesque to assume that the civil facade
is "voluntary." ...There are societies in which contrition and shame
control defendants' behaviour to a greater extent than does violence....
But I think it is unquestionably the case in the United States that most
prisoners walk into prison because they know they will be dragged or
beaten into prison if they do not walk (Cover, 1986: 1, 607).

The legal limits of legitimate force are inherently vague ? it is impossible to

define in advance exactly what form of dragging or beating the prisoner may
legitimately receive ? and strict enforcement of what limits do exist is intrinsi?
cally difficult and will often be contrary to the interests of the enforcing agency.
It would therefore be surprising to discover any state in which criminal or legally
ambiguous acts of violence by state agents did not occur. It would be equally
astounding if any state were able to eliminate the innumerable opportunities for
predatory crime inherent in economic regulation and revenue-raising (Smart,
1999). Some states, however, plainly commit far more and more serious crimes
than others do, and it might be expected that these differences would be among the
central concerns of criminology (Comfort, 1950). Yet the subject remains even
more neglected than corporate crime. For example, the 1,267-page Oxford
Handbook of Criminology devotes one sentence to the crimes of "the army, police,
or government bureaucracies" (Nelken, 1997: 907) I1
One reason for this neglect may be the difficulty of defining "state crime,"
given the obviously paradoxical results of adopting the state's own legal criteria.
As Hannah Arendt (1965) pointed out, Adolf Eichmann was a model law-abiding
citizen of the Third Reich, conscientiously arranging the extermination of Jews
even in the face of "criminal" orders to the contrary. A state could eliminate state
crime simply by giving its officials unlimited powers, or generate an alarmingly
high "state crime rate" by holding its officials rigorously accountable to humane
and strictly defined legal standards. The analytic value of using the concept of

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State Crime, Human Rights, and the Limits of Criminology 103

"crime" to designate morally abhorrent state practices may therefore appear question?
able (Sharkansky, 1995). We wish to argue, however, that "crime" can be defined
independently of the state by drawing on the concepts of human rights and deviance.

Human Rights

In the literature on state crime, the main alternative to a legalistic definition is

one that defines crime in terms of human rights. There are two very different
human-rights-based definitions of state crime, reflecting the division within
human rights scholarship between what Campbell (1999) calls the "torture
paradigm" and the "health paradigm." The "torture paradigm," exemplified in
criminology by Cohen (1993), "connects human rights with a shared perception
of totally unacceptable evils which are never justified and undermine the claims
to political legitimacy of any system of government" (Campbell, 1999: 18). This
can be contrasted with the "health paradigm," exemplified within criminology by
the Schwendingers (1975), which emphasizes "second generation" human rights
to well-being (health, education, meaningful work, etc.), as well as to freedom and
bodily integrity.
In some contexts there may be good reasons to concentrate on "torture
paradigm" rights for the purposes of research, while also recognizing the political
importance of wider, "health paradigm" rights (Risse et al., 1999). In our view,
however, Cohen's attempt to define a "core" of state crimes misses a crucial
sociological issue. Cohen (1993: 102) confines his attention to activities that,
although tragically commonplace in much of the world, are "anomalous" in
"democratic-type societies," such as torture in Northern Ireland and the Israeli
occupied territories. For us, the key point about state crime in liberal democracies
is that it is not aberrant or anomalous, and has no clear boundaries, but shades
imperceptibly into the routine, "legitimate" activities of the state. It is precisely
this that makes Sykes and Matza's (1957) work on "techniques of neutralization,"
on which Cohen draws heavily, so relevant to both "routine" and "gross" state
crime. Sykes and Matza's techniques of neutralization were based on "what is
essentially an unrecognized extension of defenses to crimes" (1996 [1957]: 209;
emphasis in original). Similarly, routine state crime, or legally contestable state
activity, is justified by standard criminal defenses such as "use of reasonable force
in the prevention of crime," which may or may not be accepted as valid by the legal
system or the social audience.
This is nowhere clearer than in the case of Turkey, where the state paradoxi?
cally relies on decisions of the European Court of Human Rights to "normalize"
its crimes. The concept of "emergency" implies an exceptional state of affairs, but
in Turkey ? as in Northern Ireland, to which the Turkish state points as a
precedent to justify its conduct ? "emergency" has become the norm (Gross and
Nf Aol?in, 1999), allowing the Turkish state to neutralize its crimes by using the
language of human rights and extending recognized legal defenses (Green, 2000).2

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 104 Green & Ward

Although Cohen would no doubt recognize many of the Turkish state's activities
as "core" crimes, it is also important to recognize the sociological continuities
between such crimes and the less spectacular crimes of liberal democracies
(Scraton, 1999).
The Schwendingers' use of the "health paradigm" of human rights raises its
own problems, but it does not deserve to be dismissed, as it is by Cohen, as merely
a left-wing "moral crusade." Their (1975) essay is an avowedly brief and tentative
sketch for a conceptually and empirically rigorous program of research into
violations of human rights. The fundamental principle underlying human rights,
for the Schwendingers, is that "all human beings are to be provided the opportunity
for the free development of their personalities" (as proclaimed in Article 22 of
Universal Declaration of Human Rights). This entails that "all persons must be
guaranteed the fundamental prerequisites for well-being, including food, shelter,
clothing, medical services, challenging work and recreational experiences, as well
as security from predatory individuals or repressive and imperialistic social elites"
(Schwendingers, 1975: 133-134).
The Schwendingers' definition of human rights anticipates that of the moral
and political philosopher Alan Gewirth (1978,1982), although Gewirth employs
a neo-Kantian philosophical framework, which the Schwendingers, as Marxists,
reject. (See, however, Beyleveld and Brownsword, 1986:452-456, for an attempt
to reconcile Gewirth and Marx.) Like the Schwendingers, Gewirth argues that it
is possible to identify essential prerequisites of human well-being, which are
necessary preconditions for persons to exert and develop their capacities as
purposive agents. Also like the Schwendingers, Gewirth recognizes a hierarchy of
rights, with the most basic being those, in the Schwendingers' words, that are
"absolutely essential to the realization of a great number of values" (1975: 36).
What Gewirth provides, however, is a definition not of crime, but of harm
("harm" and "violation of human rights" are interchangeable terms in Gewirth's
work). The research program outlined by the Schwendingers (1975: 146), identi?
fying indices such as "infant mortality, length of life, quality of food, diets,
medical and recreational services, employment opportunities, etc.," is that of the
fledgling discipline that Gordon et al. (1999) have proposed to call "zemiology"
(from the Greek zemia, harm or damage) ? the study of social harms. It does not
appear helpful to stretch the term "crime" to cover all social harms or even, as the
Schwendingers more modestly suggested, all the more "basic" forms of social
harm, such as preventable deaths, any more than it does to annex this vast field of
study to the specialism of criminology.

Deviance

The core subject matter of criminology is behavior that not only is, or is
perceived to be, socially harmful, but is also deviant. The term "deviance" is not
easy to define precisely, but is commonly applied to three overlapping kinds of

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State Crime, Human Rights, and the Limits of Criminology 105

behavior: that which breaks institutionalized rules (which in the context of state
action might more appropriately be termed "illegitimate" ? see below); that to
which others apply pejorative and stigmatizing "labels" (criminal, sick, perverted,
etc.), coupled with some kind of formal or informal sanctions; and that to which
the actor perceives a risk that others would apply such rules, labels, or sanctions
if they knew of it ("secret deviance").
As critics of the sociology of deviance have complained, the term is usually
reserved for relatively powerless people who are labeled and stigmatized by those
more powerful than themselves (Liazos, 1972; Sumner, 1994). Thus, Waddington
(1999: 179) insists that even the "transparently brutal" conduct of the South
African Police under apartheid was not "deviant" because it was condoned by
courts, politicians, and the white minority. However, deviancy labels and informal
sanctions can also be applied "from below" to state action that is perceived as
illegitimate: for example, when particular English police stations acquire a
reputation among the black community for racism and brutality and sections of
that community apply sanctions such as hostile demonstrations, the withdrawal of
cooperation, or even riots (e.g., Keith, 1993: Chapter 2). In Turkey, those
audiences "from below" include the Kurdish population in the southeast of
Turkey; the "Saturday Mothers" who gather in Istanbul every week to protest the
disappearance of their children, and other relatives and the human rights groups,
trade unions, Bar Associations, journalists, and other media workers whose
activities center on exposing state crime and corruption.
The ability of such audiences to apply effective censure and sanctions to the
state will clearly vary greatly according to the nature of the political system. One
of the central elements of democratic society is the strength and health of the
relationship between civil society and the state. The relationship between social
groups or civil society and the political elite in Turkey has been characterized as
generally weak (Powell, 1981: 866). The notion of institutionalized consultation
between interest groups and political parties has, therefore, been effectively absent
in Turkish politics. Interest groups thus have only a very limited role in the
development of policy and "regulation from above" continues to dominate the
process of policy-making (Heper, 1992: 186, Green, 2000).
According to American political scientist Robert Putnam, whether a state is
corrupt, inefficient, authoritarian, etc., depends largely on the extent and integra?
tion of civic associations in the society. In Turkey, with a population of some 62
million, only one million people are estimated to be involved in civic organiza?
tions.3 Political institutions have thus been distorted by the generalized lack of
public participation in the process of government. According to Putnam (1993:
120), "by far the most important factor in explaining good government is the
degree to which social and political life in a region approximates the ideal of the
civic community."4 This may go some way toward explaining the relative lack of
impact domestic audiences have had in defining Turkish state actions as criminal.

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 106 Green & Ward

The reactions of international audiences, on the other hand, have assumed

great significance in the case of Turkey, especially in view of its desire to join the
European Union (E.U.). The Council of Europe, the European Commission, and
the European Court of Human Rights have indicated the limits of legitimate
conduct to which Turkey must adhere to meet the membership requirements of the
E.U.5 In late 1997, the E.U. cited Turkey's dismal record on human rights as the
central concern in the country' s exclusion from its list of 11 prospective candidates
for membership (Guardian, December 16, 1997). In October 1999, however,
despite a recognition of continuing and widespread breaches of human rights, the
E.U. noted "some encouraging signs of democratisation"6?encouraging enough,
apparently, to override its immediate human rights concerns. On December 10,
1999, the European Union invited Turkey to become a candidate for future
membership, after 40 years of campaigning by the Turkish state. Admission will
be dependent upon the Turkish state meeting a set of economic, political, social,
and human rights criteria determined by the European Commission (1999: 15).
According to Human Rights Watch, "if the E.U. holds Turkey to its commit?
ments," membership discussions should provide a forum for genuine human rights
reform.7
As a consequence, issues of criminal justice policy and practice, particularly
in relation to criminal activity conducted by the state, seem set to play a crucial
transitional role in the "Europeanization" of Turkey. Thus, while the Turkish state
is widely seen as "criminal," it is to some extent sensitive and responsive to the
application of the deviant label. According to Seref Unal, Director General of
International Law and Foreign Relations, Turkish Ministry of Justice,

...Turkish Courts have to interpret the domestic law, regardless of its

compatibility with the Convention, in the light of the jurisprudence of the
European Court of Human rights. The Convention would only in this
sense prevail over the laws and the Constitution. Having accepted the
jurisdiction of the Court, it is also a contractual obligation.

Certain minor improvements have been noted in Turkey's human rights

practice (as it attempts to comply with E.U. human rights norms). In Risse et al.'s
"spiral model" of the socialization of human rights norm, Turkey is in the tactical
concessions phase, where the validity of international human rights norms is
acknowledged and certain minimal strategic concessions are made for largely
instrumental purposes (Risse et al., 1999: 25-28). States in this phase:

are subject to a normative process of shaming, and relegation to an out

group, which they often resent and sometimes feel is sufficiently disturb?
ing for either their international image or their domestic legitimacy that
they are willing to make human rights concessions (Ibid.: 27).

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State Crime, Human Rights, and the Limits of Criminology 107

The "spiral model" suggests that once such concessions are made, continuing
normative pressures may lead to human rights norms being internalized in a
country's political culture. Although the extent to which this has occurred in
Turkey is clearly debatable, it does appear that in the process of compliance (for
whatever ultimate ends), human rights have become part of the domestic and
international political discourse for the Turkish government.
Moving from the Turkish to the American context, one recent study that
recognizes the significance of domestic and international audiences in defining
state conduct as deviant is Kauzlarich and Kramer's Crimes of the American
Nuclear State (1998). The authors seek to demonstrate that governmental conduct,
such as threatening to use nuclear weapons, nuclear contamination of the environ?
ment, and experimental exposure of human beings to radiation, can be explained
by an extension to an organizational rather than individual level of conventional
criminological theories of motivation, opportunity, and social control. Under the
heading of social control they include not only legal sanctions, but also the
reactions of international audiences, social movements, and the media. For
example, they argue that the potential reaction of international audiences blocked
the use of nuclear weapons in Korea, and the domestic antiwar movement blocked
their use in Vietnam. On the other hand, although the contamination of the
environment and the irradiation of human subjects by the nuclear weapons
industry, "if discovered by a social group outside the complex, would [have been]
considered not only criminal but probably unconscionable" (p. 159), the secrecy
surrounding the industry fostered the development of an organizational culture
more concerned with goals than with means.
Unfortunately, although Kauzlarich and Kramer recognize the importance of
informal sanctions in the explanation of state crime, their definition of state crime
is based on a highly legalistic use of international law. For example, they claim that
because the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion in 1996 to the
effect that the threatened use of nuclear weapons is illegal, the threats of such
action that the U.S. appears to have made against China and North Korea in 1953
constituted "a form of state crime ? nuclear extortion ? that is open to
criminological analysis" (p. 39). Of what possible relevance is the ICJ's legal
opinion to the explanation of events that occurred 43 years earlier? The opinion in
question turns out to have no bearing on Kauzlarich and Kramer's account of those
events, and that account has only a tenuous connection with the specifically
criminological analyses to be found elsewhere in their book. This suggests to us
that the threats in question, while no doubt constituting grave violations of human
rights, were not the type of violations that can be usefully classed, for explanatory
purposes, as crimes.
Similarly, in the present state of international politics, the innumerable acts and
omissions that could be considered to violate the International Covenant of Social,
Economic, and Cultural Rights ? which includes most of the "health paradigm"

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 108 Green & Ward

rights enumerated by the Schwendingers ? can hardly be classed as deviant.

There can be few, if any, states that are taking steps "to the maximum of [their]
available resources" to achieve "the full realization" of, for example, the right to
work, as the Covenant (Article 2) requires. Yet such noncompliance generally runs
a negligible risk of being effectively censured as deviant ? probably much less
risk than a serious attempt to comply, which would no doubt be considered the
height of economic irresponsibility. As Henkin remarks:

In all, it is difficult to avoid the impression that there has been little
disposition in the international system to take the Covenant on Economic
and Social Rights seriously as creating international obligations for
states parties, and therefore little disposition to monitor compliance with
the Covenant, as by scrutinizing a state's expenditure for other purposes
of resources that ought to be available for meeting basic economic and
social needs of its inhabitants. Nongovernmental organizations, too,
have not undertaken such monitoring (Henkin, 1995: 224).

Legitimacy
The concept of legitimacy provides the link between state deviance and human
rights. As Habermas (1976) argues, human rights and popular sovereignty, or
variations on those themes, have been central to the legitimation of modern secular
states.
In any situation where the state's claim to legitimacy is accorded some degree
of consent ? and exactly what this "consent" amounts to may be a very difficult
question?there is likely to be some tacit understanding of the limits of legitimate
conduct (which may be more or less closely related to legal norms), departure from
which will attract some kind of censure or sanctions. (See, for example, Sparks et
al., 1996, on prisons.) As the political scientist David Beetham (1991) argues,
"disputes over political legitimacy are not simply about legal entitlement ? they
also embody disputes about whether the law is justifiable or whether it conforms
to moral or political principles that are rationally defensible." Having rejected
purely legalistic definitions of state crime, the concept of legitimacy becomes
particularly important for our argument. Rejecting, also, Weber's analysis of
legitimacy as primarily a matter of belief, we argue (with Grafstein, 1981, and
Beetham, 1991) that political legitimacy is the product of the congruence or lack
of congruence "between a given system of power and the beliefs, values, and
expectations which provide its justification" (Beetham, 1991: 11). Beetham
identifies three interweaving factors that combine to confer legitimacy ? legality
(i.e., the legal validity of the acquisition and exercise of power), justifiability in
terms of shared beliefs, and actions expressive of consent (Ibid.: 12-13). Legiti?
macy can only be "guaranteed" when the ideological framework employed to

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State Crime, Human Rights, and the Limits of Criminology 109

justify a pattern of governance is to some reasonable extent in accord (or

congruent) with the lived experience of that governance. Thus, legitimacy can
only be understood through an analysis of the actual characteristics and practices
of a particular political regime. Recalling Gramsci's work on hegemony and the
state (Hoare and Nowell-Smith, 1971), we are reminded that the fact that citizens
believe in the legitimacy of their government is not equal to the fact that a given
power relationship is legitimate.
We can therefore draw a distinction between illegitimacy and deviance (cf
Becker, 1963, on "rule-breaking behaviour" and deviance). A state practice is
illegitimate if it departs from the state's own rules or is unjustifiable in terms of the
values that the rules purport to serve. WTiether this is so is a matter the social
scientist must judge, and that judgment will often depend upon the interpretation
of ambiguous and contestable rules and values, but illegitimacy is an objective
property of the relevant act in the sense that it does not depend upon how the act
is perceived by its social audience. Rather, the concept of illegitimacy serves either
to explain an adverse social reaction to the illegitimate practice, or to indicate that
the absence of such a reaction is something that needs to be explained. By contrast,
an act is deviant only if some social group perceives it as violating an applicable
rule or value and reacts accordingly, or if the actor believes or fears that some
social group would so react if it knew of the act. In other words, a state practice
(whether "objectively" illegitimate or not) is deviant if it is either censured as
illegitimate or perceived as likely to be so censured by others. Deviance is not an
inherent property of the act, but denotes a relationship between the act, the actor,
and a particular audience.
For example, Waddington (1999) may be right to argue that police violence of
the kind notoriously meted out to the African-American motorist Rodney King,
which was (in our terms) clearly illegitimate,8 is not perceived as deviant by the
bulk of the respectable, white, American public. But it is perceived as deviant by
other African-Americans, making them (to put it mildly) less willing than they
might otherwise be to consent to police activities; and Waddington himself lays
great stress on the fears that officers entertain that any transgression will be singled
out for somewhat arbitrary punishment by their superiors. The illegitimate
character of police violence provides clear moral and political justification for
labelling it a crime; and both its deviant character (relative to specific audiences)
and its illegitimacy (the violation of norms that the police themselves purport to
uphold) raise questions germane for criminological analysis.
In most contemporary states, the values on which the legitimacy of a state
practice depends will include, inter alia, the state's real or nominal commitment
to human rights. The conceptual link between legitimacy and human rights is
regarded by natural law theorists such as Beyle veld and Browns word (1986) as
one that is valid for all times and cultures: only a legal order that upholds human
rights can make a rationally justified claim to the voluntary obedience of its

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 110 Green & Ward

citizens. From a sociological perspective, however, the link is historically contin?

gent (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1975; Donnelly, 1999): it is a fact of
political life that virtually all states now at least pay lip service to human rights,
and the most serious violations of human rights generally carry some risk of
adverse domestic and/or international reaction. The historically contingent (near-)
universality of human rights discourse, together with the way in which the concept
of human agency links it to the central concerns of sociological theory, makes it
singularly suited to a comparative analysis of state crimes in the late modern world.
We leave open the question of how far such an analysis can be extended to past eras
or different cultures.

A Definition of State Crime

Our proposal is, then, that the term "state crime" (as applied to contemporary
states) should be restricted to the area of overlap between two distinct phenomena:
(1) violations of human rights and (2) state organizational deviance. We define
human rights, following Gewirth and the Schwendingers, as the elements of
freedom and well-being that human beings need to exert and develop their
capacities for purposive action. The exact scope of such rights (or needs) is
debatable, but it is a debate to which social scientists can and should contribute.
State organizational deviance is conduct by persons working for state agencies, in
pursuit of organizational goals, that if it were to become known to some social
audience would expose the individuals or agencies concerned to a sufficiently
serious risk of formal or informal censure and sanctions to affect their conduct
significantly (for example, by inducing them to conceal or lie about their
activities). Such censure or sanctions may originate "from above" (formal legal or
disciplinary sanctions), "from below" (delegitimation, i.e., conduct manifesting a
withdrawal or erosion of consent, see Beetham, 1991), "from within" (informal
norms of the organizational culture), or "from without" (international pressures).
Our definition reserves the label "crime" for behavior that is both "objectively"
illegitimate (albeit according to an intensely value-laden criterion) and "subjec?
tively" deviant. We do not consider it morally or semantically appropriate to apply
the word "crime" either to deviations from other value systems (for example,
Islam, free trade, or socialism) to which particular states claim to subscribe, or to
practices that the critical social scientist may justifiably perceive to be illegitimate,
but which are generally accepted as part of the routine, legitimate activity of the
state (or at least as within the fair range of party-political disagreement). The
obvious example of the latter is the maintenance of a capitalist economy. The
contradiction between the gross inequities in the distribution of wealth and power
under capitalism, and ideologies of human rights and democracy call into question
the legitimacy of any capitalist state, but by no stretch of the term is this
contradiction an example of organizational deviance. It is debasing the currency
of criminology to label failures to pursue radical egalitarian policies as "crimes"

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State Crime, Human Rights, and the Limits of Criminology 111

(pace the ingenious arguments of Henry, 1991). Such general sociopolitical

questions underpin all critical social science, but we must be clear that criminology
is an inappropriate vehicle for addressing them politically.
It is also necessary (as in the field of corporate and white-collar crime) to
distinguish between individual deviant acts committed by state agents in the
course of their employment and acts committed in pursuit of organizational goals.
The organizational goals of state agencies are not necessarily those publicly
prescribed for them. For example, if police forces in practice pursue a goal of
"social discipline" rather than law enforcement as Choongh (1997) has argued, the
use of violence in pursuit of that goal (assuming there is a risk of sanctions if it
becomes known to lawyers, the media, etc.) will constitute a state crime. Because
the goals of state agencies are more various than those of commercial organiza?
tions, the boundary between organizational and individual deviance by state
agents is less clearly defined than it generally is for corporate employees. Bribery,
for example, is sometimes, like embezzlement, a straightforward crime of indi?
vidual enrichment at the expense of organizational goals. Yet exchanges of gifts,
information, or favors with business contacts or criminal informants may be a
means of advancing legitimate organizational goals (e.g., Hobbs, 1988; Smart,
1999); bribery may be tacitly condoned by states as an economical way of paying
their work forces; particular state agencies (such as some U.S. police forces in the
1960s and 1970s) may adopt corruption and extortion as informal organizational
goals (Sherman, 1978); and whole states ("kleptocracies") may exist primarily to
enrich their officials.
Implicit in the human-rights-based definition of state crime is the inclusion not
only of active violations of human rights, but also of passive failures to protect
individuals against violations of their rights by other individuals or corporations.
There is a continuum here between crimes that are plainly instigated and condoned
by state agencies (such as the activities of anti-independence militias in East
Timor), through the "capture" of regulatory agencies by the bodies they are
supposed to regulate, through negligent policing that reflects institutionalized
race, class, or gender bias, to errors of judgment that may be apparent only in
hindsight. Such definitional problems should not, however, preclude the recogni?
tion of crimes of complicity or omission as an important dimension of state crime.9

Conclusion

We have attempted to develop here an approach to state crime that retains at

its essence the concept of deviance. Relying solely on a human rights discourse
leaves us with the borderless condition of "social harm" ? politically valid, but
criminologically less satisfactory. However, when a human rights analysis is used
within a framework of deviance and legitimacy and the audience for whom state
norms are breached is extended beyond that of the powerful to those from "below,"
then we have a conceptually coherent definition of state organized crime. One of

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 112 Green & Ward

the virtues of this perspective, as we have shown, is that it allows us to systemati?

cally explore state crime in very different political contexts. The example of
Turkey and the employment of a human rights jurisprudence highlight the
"continuum" nature of state crime and the significance of the "audience" in the
application of censure. In cases of gross human rights abuse, the definitional issues
relating to state crime are less problematic (particularly when we adopt the
"labeling from below" analysis), but our definition may be most helpful at the
margins of state crime, with those acts or omissions that contribute to, or are
complicit with, breaches of human rights.

NOTES

1. There is also a brief discussion on state complicity in organized crime in Hobbs' chapter
(1997: 829-830).
2. This example illustrates why the pliable language of international conventions on human
rights does not provide a criminologically adequate definition of state crime.
3. Douglas Johnson speaking at the "Human Rights in Turkey: The Way Forward" conference
? organized by Amnesty International and the Istanbul Bar Association (November 20,1998).
4. Putnam (1993: 83) defines civic community as "patterns of civic involvement and social
solidarity."
5. In 1993, the European Union established the "Copenhagen Criteria," i.e., that candidate
countries establish stable institutions that guarantee democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and
respect for and the protection of minorities, as a basic requirement of membership.
6. European Union Commission Regular Report from the Commission on Progress Towards
Accession: Turkey ? October 13, 1999. See http://europe.eu.int/comm/enlargement/turkey.
7. Human Rights Watch, "E.U. Membership Process Could Bring Human Rights Reform in
Turkey." See http: //www.hrw.org/campaigns/turkey.
8. The culprits were acquitted of assault but later convicted of violating King's civil rights, yet
it could hardly be argued that the acquittal was legitimate in Beetham's sense.
9. The catastrophic consequences of the Turkish earthquakes in August and November 1999
may very usefully be analyzed from within the framework of our definition.

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