Ronald C. Kramer

The Origins and Development of the Concept and Theory of State-Corporate Crime:

The important contributions made by Richard Quinney to the study of corporate crime and the sociology of law, crime, and justice have influenced the development of the concept of state-corporate crime. This concept has been advanced to examine how corporations and governments intersect to produce social harm. State-corporate crime is defined as criminal acts that occur when one or more institutions of political governance pursue a goal in direct cooperation with one or more institutions of economic production and distribution. The creation of this concept has directed attention to a neglected form of organizational crime and inspired numerous empirical studies and theoretical refinements.

Poverty, Inequality, and Youth Violence

Recent school shooting incidents have served to highlight the social problem of lethal violence by young people in the United States. While many factors need to be considered, this article argues that broader social and economic forces such as poverty, inequality, and social exclusion shape most of the problem of youth violence in America. These structural factors tend to foster violence indirectly through their impact on the close-in institutions of the family, school, and community. Using the organizing concepts of social support and informal social controls, the article examines theory and research on the connections between economic inequality and social exclusion, the close-in institutions of family and community, and violent youth crime. It is argued that structural forces reduce the ability of families and communities to provide the social support and informal social control needed to prevent youth violence. Policy implications are briefly discussed.

The Space Between Laws: The Problem of Corporate Crime in a Transnational Context

During the last two decades transnational corporations (TNCs) have significantly expanded their operations in the Third World. However, in many developing nations legal controls over injurious corporate activities have not grown commensurately. As a result, TNCs operating in developing host nations have engaged legally in a variety of injurious actions that would have been violations of criminal, regulatory, or civil law in their home countries. The differences in the laws of home and host nations, and the ability of TNCs to influence the legal climate in host countries, renders the laws derived at the level of nation-states an unsatisfactory basis for determining the scope of criminological research on TNCs. Attempts within the United Nations to redefine the meaning of corporate crime by creating codes of conduct for international business, and efforts by U.S. business interests to limit these codes, are examined as a specific case in the current debate over what constitutes corporate transgressions. Utilizing the concept of critical reflexivity, we argue that the study of corporate transgression by TNCs can legitimately embrace not only violations of law, but also violations of international codes and other injurious actions that are analogous in severity and source to violations of these codes.

Is global warming a state-corporate crime?

This chapter argues that global warming can be analyzed as a form of state-corporate crime. It examines how transnational corporations and the nation states of the global North act in concert in ways that cause widespread environmental and social harm. Corporate and state actors in interaction with each other create these harms by (1) denying that global warming is caused by human activity, (2) blocking efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, (3) excluding progressive, ecologically just adaptations to climate change from the political arena, and (4) responding to the social conflicts that arise from climate change by transforming themselves into fortress societies. The chapter concludes by arguing that “green criminologists” need to engage in a “public criminology” that communicates the relationship between state-corporate crimes and environmental degradation to audiences beyond their academic peers.

Carbon in the atmosphere and power in America: climate change as state-corporate crime

Climate change caused by anthropogenic global warming is the most serious social problem, most important political issue, and greatest moral challenge the world community faces today. This article contends that the political failure of the US government to act to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and the socially organized denial of climate change that shapes that failure, can be conceptualized as state-corporate crimes. After a brief description of the nature and effects of climate change and a consideration of how these harms might be conceptualized as a criminological topic, a political economy theoretical analysis of the failure to reduce carbon emissions and the denial of climate change that impacts that failure is presented.

From “habitual offenders” to “career criminals”

Mainstream positivistic criminology has recently been challenged by a sociological perspective which views crime as a social construction and attempts to account for the collective definition of categories of crime and deviance. The purpose of this paper is to present a sociohistorical analysis and interpretation of the construction of two specific and related criminal categories: “habitual offender” and “carreer criminal.” The analysis focuses on the broad historical development of these two categories and the symbolic functions they serve. The data show that similar social conditions in two different time periods led to the development of two similar legal categories. Furthermore, both categories are judged to have served important and similar symbolic and ideological functions.

State-Corporate Crime and Criminological Inquiry

The term state-corporate crime refers to serious social harms that result from the interaction of political and economic organizations. The need for such a concept emerged from our examination of events such as the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and the fire at the Imperial chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina.1 This research made us aware of a class of organizational crimes that were the collective product of the joint actions between a state agency and a business corporation. This suggested that an additional conceptualization of deviant organizational relationships between government agencies and business corporations was needed. Since those original papers on the concept and theory of state-corporate crime, we, and a number of other researchers, have used the concept to analyze a wide variety of organizational harms.2 This chapter will describe the origins and development of the concept of state-corporate crime, review some of the research that has been carried out under this rubric, present the theoretical framework that has been most often utilized, and assess where the study of state-corporate crime might go in the future. Before we will address these issues, however, we will sketch out the historical context for considering the relationship between power and crime and explore the relationship between state-corporate crime and criminological inquiry.

State violence and violent crime

Last years American Society of Criminology conference examined the theme “Violent Crime and Its Victims.” Yet amidst the hundreds of papers it produced, only a handful addressed state violence and its countless victims. Despite its neglect by the mainstream, state violence is an important criminological concern that is essential to any meaningful discussion of crime control. The problem of state violence must be faced in its own right. But understanding its connections to more traditional violent crimes will also be our only hope for alleviating suffering in our societies. As an exercise in peacemaking criminology, we must illustrate the problem of state violence, identify its different forms (including those most often ignored by criminol‐ogists), and describe the connections between state crime and traditional violent crimes.

Torture, impunity, and open legal spaces: Abu Ghraib and international controls

Transnational and non‐conventional forms of crime, particularly state crimes, are increasingly becoming the focus of criminological work. Within this body of research, however, relatively little attention has been paid to the critical issue of international controls (see Rothe & Mullins, 2006). We believe that it is important to explore the ability of intergovernmental bodies such as the United Nations, International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court, to exert some measure of social control on state crimes. Our intent is to explore this issue by examining the cases of abuse and torture that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison during the American occupation of Iraq. Specifically, we examine the extant controls at the international level and their subsequent failure as such. We begin with a brief review of Abu Ghraib and the subsequent cases of abuse and torture followed by descriptive accounts of international institutions of social control as they pertain to Abu Ghraib. In conclusion, we explore why these institutions failed to control the acts that occurred and we offer several policy suggestions that could act to strengthen the existing controls.

The ideological construction of crime: An analysis of the L.E.A.A. career criminal program

This paper examines the development of the LEAA Career Criminal Program and analyzes the ideological consequences of the construction of the legal category “career criminal.” It is argued that the creation of this program illustrates how the criminal justice process contributes to the existence of ideological hegemony and societal reproduction. No one at LEAA, however, ‘deliberately set out to create a program which would serve these ideological functions. The evidence shows that career advancement, professional goals, fortuitous circumstances, and political interests were the factors that lay behind the development of this particular program. Yet the program did have ideological consequences. There was a complex chain of subtle and often unreflected upon inducements, rewards, and incentives which made it likely that the program would be shaped in accordance with the interests of the dominant class.