Lecture 7 STATE CRIME
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RED FEATHER INSTITUTE
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STATE CRIME
in The United States of AmericaI
This Lecture discusses the sources of both domestic and transnational political crime in and of the USA. In short, beneficiaries of domestic state crime are racist, class and gender elites while victims vary with the form of crime at hand. After more definitional matters are covered, several dimensions of political crime are considered; some are engineered by the state while some entails crime against the state. The Lecture also examines some tactics by which the modern, capitalist state hides its complicity in crime at home and abroad. Solutions to state crime suggested here center around social justice. In brief, the argument is that moral agency must be vested in every social unit from the acting individual to global institutions if we are to reduce state involvement in crime at home and abroad. |
I. INTRODUCTION: Now that the cold war is over, the
United States is the only existing super power and, since 1945 at least, has been the
chief architect of political crime in the emerging global economy (Klare, 1974; Agee,
1975; Chomsky and Herman, 1979; Stockwell, 1979; Frappier, 1985; Barry and Preusch, 1986).
Thus, as we go into the 21st century, the USA is a particularly good case which to examine
in order to view the larger drama of state crime and social justice. If we can sort out
the changing interconnections between state crime on the one side and the more structural
sources of private crime on the other, we just may be able to move away from the false
peace of control and punishment toward the real peace of social justice early on in the
21st Century.
When one considers all forms of crime, the USA is, arguably, the most crimogenic country
among advanced industrial countries (Currie, 1985). It is not a coincidence that, of the
major industrialized countries, the USA has the highest official crime rates, the greatest
inequality (Kloby, 1991) and the least effective programs of social justice (Eitzen,
1991). This study of state crime is set in the larger context of the struggle for and
against class, racist, and gender privilege. In such context, criminal law and the
criminal justice system become tools in the struggle for and against social justice within
the USA.
The Political Economy of State Crime.
I argue that the forms and incidence of state crime at home and abroad varies with the
character of the political economy (Currie, 1985; Michalowski, 1985; Piven-Fox and
Cloward, 1971; Quinney, 1970, 1975). As used here, political economy refers variously to
class relations, status hierarchies as well as inequalities in social power. The structure
of the political economy used here is modeled after O'Connor (1973). He maps the economy
into three sectors: monopoly, state and competitive sectors. In brief, those at the top of
the state sector cooperate with those at the top of the monopoly sector to extract value
from workers and customers at home. The capitalist state serves three generic interests of
transnational corporations abroad: access to markets, raw materials and cheap labor.
Parallel and deeply embedded in this political economy are several status hierarchies, all
of which enlist state agencies and the legal institution to uphold status privilege.
Gender hierarchy, generally supported by natural law and by some forms of social theory,
is under attack by some elements of the state sector--thus fueling some hostility and
resistance to state hegemony. Other status hierarchies include a very strong racist status
system--also under stress by some parts of the state. Ethnic and religious status
hierarchies get uneven and distant support from the state sector.
The structure of the world economy is constantly shifting but there are two very loose and
over-lapping hierarchical systems which mediate transnational state crime. First there is
the globalization of capitalism in which some seven rich and powerful nations lead by the
USA which dominate the global transfer of wealth.
The USA, England, Germany, Japan, Canada, Italy and France use a
wide array of military, financial and diplomatic tools to maintain economic hegemony. A
second emerging transnational structure is comprised of economic blocs such as the
European Common Market and the North American Free Trade Alliance. Such blocs will mediate
transnational state crime between and with blocs in ways not now clear (Young, 1991a). In
all this, individual countries compete and sometimes subvert each other. In the USA, Japan
is considered to be an uncertain partner in the Big Seven.
It is in support of these very complex and loosely connected political economies at home
and abroad that most state crime is generated. Domestic and transnational capitalism
requires a certain social peace in order to transfer capital, move personnel and goods as
well as to extract profits. Much of the policing action of the USA at home as well as with
the United Nations is aimed at securing the false peace of transnational inequality.
We will look at four dimensions of generic political crime in which the
state is directly involved; either as engineer or as object of illegal activity. In
addition to these most general crimes of the capitalist state, there are specific kinds of
domestic political crime which we will consider.
These generic crimes of the state against:
a) reproduction of stratification systems which defeat the democratic impulse.
b) crimes against other non-citizens (indigenous peoples, 'illegal' residents, and visiting foreigners). These crimes are even more egregious that crimes against one's own citizens since there is no pretense at Constitutional protections nor protection under the law from exploitation and aggression by corporations and private justice endeavors.
c), transnational state crime. Much of the transnational crime engineered by the State Department, by the C.I.A., by the military and by the secret agencies established by various presidents to circumvent Congress.
d) a fourth kind of political crime, that of declassed citizens against their own state is best read as opposition to the changing role of the state from supporting to opposing racist and gender privilege. Much of this 'crime' is pre-theoretical; it ranges from the masculine rage of declassed males to the bitterness of marginalized workers against minorities and foreigners. One could make the claim that much street crime is pre-theoretical rebellion against capitalism itself...theft, robbery, arson, embezzlement, burglary all share in common a studied refusal to obey market imperatives of capitalism. This does not excuse street thugs from the consequences of their predation...it simply puts it in the context of the larger political economy in which it occurs.
The recent bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City is a
case in point. Those who bombed the building have lost significant economic power through
transformations in the transnational wage labor market. They have also lost status
advantages over women and minorities. Self-styled state militias and separatist sects
oppose the role of the state in support of gender equality, in affirmative action for
minorities, use of their tax dollars for those on welfare as well as a number of other
causes voiced in the many talk radio shows and in the literature of the far Right.1
A. Definitions. In order to speak of the kind of
wrong done by the state or wrong not yet forbidden to the state; and thus put opposition
to state crime in perspective, I use an expanded version of the United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights for a postmodern definition of crime.2
The Rights and Obligations which ground this postmodern view of
crime begin with physical needs, food, health care, housing, and communication; they speak
of security within one's own society; they extend protection to the cultures of peoples
other than one's own; they include the physical and natural environment, center upon the
everyday requisites for a prosocial individual at work, at home and, especially, in
religion (Young, 1983). They end with the political rights of a democratic citizenry. I
use the term, crime, in this more substantive sense; I use the term, illegal, to refer to
the more technical definition; the violation of a law enacted by a legislature. Much
anti-state activity is illegal but not criminal in this usage (Sharkansky, 1995).
B. Distinctions A crime is, thus, any act by an individual, group, business,
institution or nation which interferes with the process by which human beings share moral
agency within the socio-cultural formation in which they live or chose to live (Young,
1981). 'Illegality' refers to behavior proscribed by state law; it may or may not be
criminal in the terms set forth here. A wide variety of anti-state activity is illegal but
decidedly prosocial hence not criminal even if proscribed and punished as such by the
state.
In order to gain intellectual leverage on the concept of state crime and to appreciate the
many illegal efforts to control state crime, it is essential also to distinguish between
personal crime and structural crime.
1. Personal crime is the harm done to one or more individuals by the acts
and intentions of specific human beings for purposes of personal gain or to generate
cultural capital; ethnic, gender, religious or racist privilege.
There are several kinds of personal crime committed by private persons who are agents of
various state units on behalf of those who benefit from inequality. These include perjury
before Congress, extortion, burglary, falsification of documents, assassination, slander,
libel, misprision of a felony, conversion of public property, invasion of privacy,
interference with mail and telephone services as well as electoral fraud. The deeds of J.
Edgar Hoover and Oliver North are good examples of many kinds of personal crimes
engineered by private persons, strategically located in the state sector. Hoover used
state power to support class, racial and gender privilege (Cook, 1965). North was part of
a large secret government which by-passed the Congress and engineered crime in several
countries around the world (Christic Institute Report, 1991).
There are also several kinds of personal crimes committed by those hostile to the modern
state. They include assassination, bombings, high-jacking of airplanes, sabotage of
government programs, tax evasions, illegal money transfers, smuggling, illegal migration,
and just plain theft. Many of these crimes against the state are directly sponsored by
underground organizations but many emerge out of the generalized discontent with a state
which threatens ancient systems of social honor while helping selected interest groups
acquire both economic and social power.
2. Structural Crime is that harm done to humans and to the human process by
virtue of the way social relationships are organized by state law, by religious tradition
or private coercion.
There are, within contemporary America, five such 'structures of domination' which
routinely degrade persons individually and collectively: racism, sexism, class privilege,
degradations associated with age and aging as well as forms of bureaucratic authority
(Schroyer, 1973). These are defined here as structural crime in that they tend to cripple
the human project as defined by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These
crimes are built into the very norms of everyday life in school, church, work, sports, and
family life; state agents and agencies seldom need act unless such structures are
systematically challenged. Those in the state sector which support these systems of
domination are not seen to be criminals nor are they bothered by guilt or shame in the
supporting them.
3. Domestic State Crime. Domestic state crime refers to the activities of
the state which violate those provisions of the USA Constitution having to do with due
process, search and seizure, trial by impartial jury, as well as those policies which tend
to reproduce structures of privilege or subvert democratic processes. Both personal crime
and structural crime of the sort mentioned above are included in this concept.
4. Transnational State Crime. Transnational state crime covers those
political, economic and military activities of the state which are inimical to political
processes, to cultural integrity, to the economic welfare or to the health and well being
of the citizens of another country. This kind of crime is oriented to the interests of
those multi-national corporations based in the USA as they try to expand markets abroad;
try to obtain steady supplies of strategic raw materials at low cost and or try to
re-patriate profits from other countries.
The political tools the U.S.A. uses in transnational state crime include: 1) fiscal tools
such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund which enforce the rules by
which a great deal of wealth is transferred from poor countries to rich capitalist
countries 2) subversive tools such as the National Security Agency which monitors and
decodes communications within and between countries; the C.I.A. which buys and/or subverts
political processes around the world; and 3) overt coercive tools such as the various
military forces which support oppressive governments around the world as well as 4)
diplomatic tools centered in the State Department which offers a variety of services to
transnational corporations based in the U.S.A. There is also several radio transmitting
facilities; which help consolidate ideological hegemony of the West in 3rd world
countries.
5. Theoretically Informed Crime. Crime is theoretically informed when it is
aimed at social justice of the sort mentioned above. Good theory and good politics combine
to render resistance and rebellion theoretically sound. When the state uses illegal phone
taps, conducts seizures and searches without probable cause, commits slander and false
rumor to discredit selected groups, enjoins peaceful assembly or inserts agents to provoke
a group into illegal activity, however laudable the goals or however fascist the groups
targeted, still such crime is pre-theoretic in the terms used here.
One could cite a great many activities of the state which are theoretically sound but
employ tactics which embody unnecessary repression. I offer two exemplars: the use of
modern technology to monitor the activities of a whole cohort of citizens when but a few
are suspected of crime is a case in point. The use of war when diplomacy and sanctions
suffice to the same goals. War may solve the legitimacy problems of a Johnson, Nixon,
Reagan, Bush or Clinton but do so by killing numbers of Vietnamese, Grenadines,
Nicaraguans or Iraqis themselves quite innocent of the crimes of their leaders alleged by
US state officials.
Sometimes street politics become theoretically valid in terms of their objective
consequences. Tax rebellions in colonial days; farmers' rebellions in the 1840s and 1930s;
slave rebellions and civil rights marches across American history; suffragette movements
as well as direct labor action have been important to the uncertain democracy in the USA
today. Often street politics, especially gang warfare simply solve the status and fiscal
problems of a few at great cost to the larger public.
I will indicate the degree to which some crimes against the state are theoretically
informed in the relevant sections.
There are several major forms of domestic political crime within the USA. They include:
1) Crimes of the State against its own citizens. This form of state crime tends to reproduce the structures of domination or
2) solve the economic and political problems of one sector of society at the expense of another by transferring the costs of capitalism to worker, women, minorities and the poor. Price fixing, capital flight, pollution, discrimination and the marketting of dangerous drugs and products do increase profits but at a terrible price to those who are victimized.
3) Much of the current crime against the state involves the efforts to maintain gender, racist or class privilege. The multiple and very different policing systems; the complex tax code, devolution of federal power to racist and sexist state legislatures as well as transfer of the costs of reproducing, socializing and training the next generation of workers to mothers isolated from kin, abandoned by fathers, neglected by law-makers and degraded by a cheap-jack welfare state.
Much of this has been set forth in other Lectures but it is good to think of it in terms of political crime as well.
4) Crimes against the state as a tactic to oppose civil rights or affirmative action are comparatively rare in the USA since the 1960's but the various private militias, as well as separatist sects informed by religious teachings, resist state hegemony in the collection of taxes, in the execution of family law, in control of firearms and in the separation of church and state.
DOMESTIC STATE CRIME IN HISTORY: There is a long
history of state organized crime within the USA (Syzmanski, 1980). The Revolutionary war
was, itself, an organized conspiracy against that state crime committed by the British
Crown on behalf of British business interests. The new American government later used
state power to harass those citizens who had supported the Royalist cause of England.
Later, in Washington, D.C., there was a struggle between the Jeffersonians and the Adamses
which involved the use of state power to repress political opposition; each side
represented a class sector; both Adamses represented commodity and industrial capitalism
of the North; Jeffersonians were for states rights and agrarian society.3
With the compromise of 1877, racism once again became official policy in the
South while the power of the state was once again used, along with policing by the Klan,
to oppress Blacks and to repress liberal Southerners (Perlo, 1991). The aftermath of the
Civil War lead to depressions, disemployment and thus, class warfare (Sherman, 1991). With
the labor troubles and citizen unrest of the 1870's, the U.S. government appropriated
Indian lands granted by treaty and opened up those lands to displaced workers and workers.
In passing, this American state engineered an uncertain genocide of American Indians
(Churchill, (n.d.).
By the 1880s, the West was 'settled;' by which is meant that most Native
American Indians were either dead or confined to reservations (Weatherford, 1988: 163).
Labor struggles reappeared as disemployed and under-employed peoples for jobs and workers
demanded safe working conditions, decent wages, pension plans, health care and job
security (Yow-Suen and Lo, 1991). With the labor victories of the 1930's, the federal
government and most of the state governments reduced the use of state power against
workers. Corporate America, too, had realized that it was far better to have labor peace
and expand a market than to call in state police and risk the lost of markets to domestic
and foreign competition through prolonged class struggle.4
The use of state power against workers still happens, but not often these days...workers
have votes; they use social power to elect congress and senate members and to defeat
opponents to the rights of labor. State crime took an outward turn as the USA assumed the
mantle of a superpower, more about which below.
During WWII, President F. D. Roosevelt issued an executive order to put thousands of
Japanese citizens in concentration camps in Western States in violation of Constitutional
protections (Lyman, 1977). Hundreds of Aleuts were also illegally deported to Alaska
during WWII where a great many died. After WWII, alone among former global powers, class
conflict subsided as American factories worked overtime turning out the steel, autos,
T.V.s and other goods demanded by a resurgent global economy.
During the Korean War, the Vietnamese war (Frappier, 1985) and, more recently, during the
invasions of Grenada and Panama, state power was and is used to harass and discredit those
opposed to federal policy on the war. In the 60s, the FBI mounted a four part secret war
against peaceful political protest in an infamous program called Cointel,
counter-intelligence; it targeted the Black Power and the Civil Rights, the Women's, the
Socialist Labor as well as the Anti-war Movements (Cook, 1965; Wise and Ross, 1964). These
crimes against citizens of the USA merge with and are domestic spin-offs of international
crime.
These waves of state repression are, in terms of human rights,
unnecessary repression since U.S. citizens have the legal and moral right to equal
protection in both criminal and civil law; the right to protest, to organize in redress of
grievance and to take peaceful political action to effect those rights guaranteed by both
the U.S. Constitution and by the U.N. Declaration of which the U.S. is signatory.5 Each wave of repression was directly connected to efforts by
USA citizens or by Native American Indians to oppose inequalities in wealth, status or
social power at home or abroad.
DOMESTIC STATE CRIME TODAY. One can argue that there is, today, less state
crime in the USA than in its prior history. Workers, ethnic and racial minorities, women
as well as the elderly have all been empowered such that both the Congress and the office
of the President of the United States has begun to respond. There have been several facets
to this empowerment. The effort to lower the cost of wages has brought ever more women and
ethnic minorities into the labor force. Then too the more progressive churches, especially
the Black church, has supported such movements with moral power. Labor struggles have seen
the use of physical power on both sides. After World War II, a certain labor peace was
struck in order to exploit a global economy devastated by modern military weaponry.
Whatever the case, one cannot read the larger sweep of history without
grasping the fact that, in the USA as in the larger world, significant advances in the
status of Afro-Americans, of women, workers, the elderly and children has occurred.6
All these changes, in the USA, bespeak a changing role of the federal and
various states in supporting repression. The 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution
as well as the 19th Amendment disengaged the federal government from overt support of
slavery, racism and patriarchy. Although there continues to be personal state crime at
home, the U.S. government and its agencies plays a large role in structural crime both at
home and abroad.
a. Personal State Crime. Using reports from FBI agents, news reports and
Congressional sources, Cook (1965) describes the way the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, used
its police powers to control political dissent, workers' movements and even Congress and
the President. Hoover illegally ordered collection of information on private citizens and
upon state officials in the effort to obstruct social justice activity and to privilege
political, sexual and economic practices of dominant groups. Blackstock (1976) reports at
length on Cointel, four secret and illegal programs mounted by the F.B.I. in the 1960s,
mentioned above, and 1970s against the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the
socialist labor movement, and the women's movement.
The vendetta by Hoover against Martin Luther King has been widely reported. Hoover and his
aides used illegal wire taps, false documents released to the press, anonymous letters to
King's wife, Coretta, as well as direct surveillance by federal agents to de-stabilize the
civil rights movement and to dis-credit Mr. King personally. It is worth noting that these
and other federal agents were also infiltrating the Klan and, in similar fashion, harassed
its members. The motives were different; the illegality similar.
The F.B.I. also harassed Cesar Chavez as he tried to organize farm workers in California
and the western states. They collected over 1400 pages of 'evidence' about his activities
and engaged in a wide variety of activities which violated due process in order to
discredit his personal life and labor struggles.
Watergate involved the systematic use of federal agencies against selected political
opponents of Mr. Nixon. The power of the White House, of the F.B.I., of the C.I.A., of the
Treasury Department and of the Justice Department colluded to distance the President and
the Committee to Re-elect the President from a burglary at the Watergate office/residence
complex. Various federal, state, local and regional officials continue to use state power
against selected targets on both the Right and the Left as well as political opponents. In
the 70's, Congress passed several laws restricting the use of federal agencies in such
personal use of state power. Subsequent Republican administrations; Mr. Reagan and Mr.
Bush 'relaxed' these standards, arguably in the general interest (Young, 1975).
b. Structural State Crime: State crime against women, workers, minorities
and separatist conservative social movements can be understood best in the larger context
of inequality. Of the major structures of domination, the state continues to play an
active but very mixed role in class, racist and gender conflict. Recent efforts by the
Republican members of Congress to dismantle social justice programs serving the young and
the aged mark a return of official dis-interest in these problems.
1) Class. The federal government still orchestrates and enforces civil and criminal
law which uphold class interests (Gimenez, 1991; Sherman, 1991; Fox, 1991). Inequality in
the USA, measured in terms of net worth, is greater than any time since 1929: 1% of U.S.
citizens possess 37.7% of net worth. The top 20% of the population owns 83.6% of net worth
leaving 12.3% for the middle fifth and 4.9% for the lower working class. The bottom fifth
is constantly in debt (Kloby, 1991). Since most federal transfer payments go to the top
2/5ths of the population and since most taxes are regressive in effect, the state
engineers a vast transfer of unearned wealth across class lines (Eitzen, 1991).
Tax policy, government transfer payments, technical education, insurance programs and
infrastructure expenses at federal, state, and local levels provide public programs for
private profit (Currie and Skolnick, 1991; Eitzen, 1991:49). Efforts to control state
sponsored class warfare in the USA is limited to tax rebellions, cheating on income tax
returns, demands for special interest programs which benefit workers, women and minorities
also and, occasionally, by progressive legislation in Congress and the various state
legislatures. During the Reagan years, such efforts were minimal; the federal apparatus
was used on behalf of race, class and gender inequality (Young, 1988). Using the federal
debt as an anchor point, conservative Congressional and Senate members elected in 1994
have renewed class warfare. Their Contract for America reduces taxes on the wealthy and
upon corporations while it cuts back on federal programs for the poor.
Various state agencies vigorously police the kinds of crime committed by the underclass
but continues to turn a blind eye toward crimes of white collar professionals as well as a
great deal of corporate crime (Young, 1987). The Reagan administration instructed the
Justice Department to terminate legal action against a wide variety of corporations under
indictment or investigation. It instructed the new Director of the Environmental
Protection Agency to cease and desist enforcement of pollution laws. It dis-mantled some
of the legal aid programs for both the inner city and for rural legal services.
2) Racism
Racism continues as an institutional feature of the USA (Perlo, 1991). Although there has
been much progressive legislation enacted by the Congress in the 1960's, actual
implementation has been uneven and, in the coupling of class, race and gender, puts an
inordinate burden on Black and Hispanic Americans, and especially upon women. Universities
and colleges, supported by public funds, serve the information needs of capital by course
and curricula while they serve the legitimacy needs of racists and sexists by ideology
presented as theory (Ewen, 1991).
The murder of Martin Luther King effectively ended social movements as a carrier of
emancipatory politics for minorities. Street crime and riots, mostly pretheoretical forms
of resistance, are the major forms of rebellion against racism in the USA today. These are
discussed below.
Native Americans continue to bear the heaviest burdens of racism on reservations and in
the policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Nixon administration loosened controls
over Indian Affairs and, in consequence, enabled some Indian tribes to take more control
over both natural resources and public services. In recent years, income from gambling has
been put to good use by those tribes which have such income. Infant mortality rates
continue to be among the highest in the USA while alcoholism, dis-employment and suicide
remain high. These problems are the legacy of the theft of land from Native Americans and
from federal refusal to honor treaties. Courts in various state and federal jurisdictions
have begun to enforce some provisions of some treaties; notably fishing rights and mineral
rights.
3) Gender
Davis and Faith (1985) offer us a broad, historical look at the changing role of the state
in supporting gender inequality. In patriarchal societies, the state yields its monopoly
over force back to men to use to ensure property rights, unwaged domestic services as well
as sexual accessibility to husbands. Men thereby obtain a decided power advantage at home
even while most men work in highly stratified social institutions in which they themselves
are rendered powerless by the hierarchical organization. Federal, state and local laws as
well as local enforcement now challenge the hegemony of males in the home and trigger
considerable resentment toward the state.
Davis and Faith argue that, in advanced capitalism, women are becoming a
political threat to male hegemony at work, in politics and at home. They say that the
current crisis in gender control is the inability of the state to maintain male preference
in public and at home. Both the media and conservatives in the state sector dramatize
'crimes of women' as a consequence of this loss of male authority in the home. Both
attribute the increases in juvenile crime as well as in street crime to the changing role
of women to the end of political legitimacy for more traditional roles.7 While the Reagan and Bush administrations joined with the
conservative agenda in reproducing traditional femininity as a solution to the fiscal and
moral crisis of America, still the logic of the labor market bestows economic and social
power upon women with which to rebel and resist gender oppression.8
B. INTERNATIONAL STATE CRIME: THE U.S.A. The USA has had a long
history of state crime abroad, centering in Central America (Barry and Preusch, 1986).
These crimes were, at first, oriented to the protection of American capital in former
Spanish colonies, the 'right' for which was won during the Spanish American war and the
first invasion of Cuba. Later, as populism and/or socialist ideas spread around the world,
The USA, as a chief hegemonic power in the Global Capitalist System, embarked upon a
methodical subversion of internal political processes of 'unfriendly' states (Chomsky and
Herman, 1979; Klare, 1984).
Most of the state crime in the world today is found in the 120 or so poor countries which
make up the 3rd World. Death Squads, disappearances, imprisonment without a trial,
intimidation, voting fraud, a weak and venal juridical system, terrible prison conditions,
together with an elaborate system of police spies and informers mark third world politics.
The USA has been party to this crime (Chomsky and Herman, 1979) while U.S. citizens are
beneficiary in terms of less costly raw materials, cheap commodity imports. Low cost
consumer goods benefit retail firms and their customers but tend to disemploy workers
around the country. Corporate crime is becoming internationalized; (i.e., it no longer
benefits particular countries but rather benefits an array of transnational corporations
which claim loyalty to no nation-state).
Some political crime is directed at existing and former socialist countries who provide either a challenge to capitalist hegemony in the world or provide a large market for consumer goods peddled by a State Department and de-politicized by the US military or its International finance agencies.
Perhaps the most extensive form of
state-organized crime by the Reagan Administration involved The National Security Agency
which, at the direction of William Casey and others, put together a secret military
organization complete with illegal funding which pursued its own foreign policy outside
the provisions of the Constitution. House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas (Dem) said that the
Iran-Contra hearings alone revealed that the USA violated the law seven times.9
Despite all this political crime engineered by successive administrations
against third world countries, at home the USA still is one of the more liberal states in
the world. There remains much to do to end state crime of officials in cities, the
separate states and in the federal system; the solution to state crime continues to be
centered around the quest for democratic institutions as well as that for social justice.
C. CRIMES OF CITIZENS AGAINST THE STATE. There are many
forms of crimes committed by citizens against their own state. They vary from tax evasion
to overt rebellions. Citizens on the Right and Left who commit crimes against the state
have in common a refusal to concede political legitimacy to the policies and programs of
the state. Such crimes against the state are of interest in a treatise on controlling
state crime since the magnitude of anti-state crime gives one insight into the degree to
which the state engineers structural crime against its own citizens. One cannot control
crime against the state while leaving the structural inequalities in place.10 Still less can one control street crime. A continuing cycle
of rebellion and resistance can be read as proof presumptive of the inability of the state
to serve the general interest.
1. Left-Wing Anti-state Crime. Left-Wing crime is defined here as crime
against the stratified political economy of the USA. Left-Wing crime varies markedly in
its efficacy at instituting social justice. The categories of Left-Wing crime below are
arranged in rough ascending order of their theoretical soundness; that is, in terms of
both the progressive nature of goals at hand as well as the technical rationality of the
means involved.
a). Street Crime. Robbery, burglary, theft, drug dealing, mugging and various
street cons may be seen as pretheoretical resistance to the logic of market capitalism in
the first instance and efforts by minorities to reunite production and distribution by
extra-legal means in the second. Women commit four kinds of economic crime; check kiting,
prostitution, shop lifting, and embezzlement. While this is not theoretically informed
crime as defined here, still it is a rebellion against property law and market dynamics;
more to the point, it repairs in rough fashion, the effects of patriarchy to give
preference to men in economic activity.
One should note that it is not race nor age which predicts upon crime; race and age are
correlates of street crime however white collar crime, corporate crime and most state
crime is engineered by older, wealthy, well embedded white males (Young, 1993a). One
should also note that the victims of such crime are mostly poor and minority peoples; thus
most street crime is pretheoretical; it does not alter structural inequality; it provides
only short-term personal gain bought at the expense of others. Still the theft of a car or
the sale of drugs enables minorities to enter the market and purchase commodities, and
thus, embodies rebellion to race and class privilege. Connections between gender and
prostitution also change across culture and across economic formations; today male
prostitution is a growth industry. When securely connected to the means of production,
neither women nor men often prostitute themselves; at least not on the street.
b) Riots. Solomon and his associates found a substantial reduction in rates of
street crime in three cities they studied during periods of organized social protest and
'direct action' for civil rights in those cities (1980: 35). They conclude that aggression
occurring within the framework of community action may reduce the aggressive outbursts of
less theoretically informed street crime. This fact resonates with the sub-thesis in this
Lecture that support of racism by the state is part of a larger, richly interconnected set
of social factors which make the USA the mostly criminalized society among advanced
industrialized societies. The solution to many forms of street crime lies in the reduction
of state crime.
Partially theoretic rebellion and resistance can be seen in the 1980 Liberty City (Miami)
riots and in the riots following the Rodney King beating by Los Angeles Police Officers.
In Miami, Arthur McDuffie, a black insurance agent living in Miami, Florida was stopped
one evening by white police. Four policemen beat McDuffie to death. The police officers
were later acquitted of crime by an allwhite jury. Riots broke out in Liberty City; its
black residents burned and looted. They also stopped cars containing white citizens and
beat and killed the occupants. Most of the businesses looted were white businesses. Blacks
put signs on stores owned by other Blacks in order to protect them from looting. This
tactic was fairly successful in most riots.
The violence was clearly political in nature and it clearly targeted those who had
benefited for so long by the structure of racial discrimination. It was partially
theoretic in that, while the stores which were looted were almost always owned by white
absentee owners, it did not change the objective conditions in which Blacks found
themselves. After the riots, unemployment rates continued to be high; housing continued to
be inferior; health care and community services are still lacking. White police continue
to occupy black neighborhoods and harass young Black people. After the food, clothing,
appliances and cash looted was used up, Blacks had to go back to the same stores, buy
inferior goods at inflated prices and speak humbly to the White owners in asking for
credit.
The riots after the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles were less theoretically informed.
Young black men burned and looted stores owned by Asian Americans; indeed stores owned by
Blacks in the area did not escape looting. Asian Americans are not the class enemy of
Black Americans--racism as a social relationship is the proper theoretical target of
rebellion not particular persons or other ethnic groups; not even Anglo-Americans.
c) Banditry. Bandits steal from the rich and share out among their own poor. Bank
robbers, embezzlers, computer hackers, and train robbers are admired in the USA by those
who think that bandits are only robbing the robbers. There have been a lot of such bandits
in American History. Jesse James, Billy the kid, Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, Bonnie
and Clyde among others were folk heroes to populist sentiment from the 1870s to the 1930s.
In some societies, kidnappers are seen to be heroes since they extort money from the rich.
In his excellent article on banditry, Pat O'Malley (Cited in Young, 1985) found that, in
Australia:
*bandits were supported by their rural community
*bandits tended to rob class enemies: merchants and squatters
*banditry tended to redistribute wealth downward
*bandits are symbols of resistance against the ruling class
O'Malley confirms Hobsbawm's thesis that banditry disappears
when the state ceases to act on behalf of class elites. Hobsbawm held that unorganized
class conflict is the natural terrain for banditry. When the urban and rural poor are able
to organize, such crime declines.
d) Direct Action: There are several theoretically informed illegal movements on the
Left which use tactics that are, in the short run, effective in securing their ends.
Schmid and Longman study terrorism around the world (cited in Young, 1993a). They have
listed 38 terrorist organizations active in the USA in the past 20 years. Most are
inactive. Schmid and Longman say that the most systematically violent group in the USA are
Islamic activists. They retaliate for bombing forays on Iraq by the US Military. The
devastation at the World Trade Center in New York was part of a larger effort to bring
that violence back to the United States. Their position is that Islamic Law requires the
wealth of the region to be shared out among Islamic peoples rather than enrich private
families in small states created by Colonial fiat.
Earth First is a group of radical environmentalists who take direct and illegal action
against timber companies and construction equipment which are used to despoil the
wilderness. The Sanctuary Movement, mentioned earlier in another context, offers shelter
to illegal migrants. There is a direct action group among the gay Left in the USA.
2. Right-Wing Anti-state Crime. Right-wing Anti-state crime includes
assassinations, bribery of law enforcement officers, purchase of the political process,
bombings, illegal acquisition and storage of arms, threats and criminal conspiracies as
well as organized resistance to state directives. Set in the contest for and against
social inequalities, Right-wing underground crime increases when the state fails to
engineer structural crimes on its behalf (Dobratz and Shanks-Meile, 1987; Young, 1983).
Most Human Rights violations which, not long ago, were well institutionalized in work,
home, school, church and law are now forbidden by law and ostracized by public opinion.
Racist, gender and class violence which used to be initiated or accommodated by the state
is often forbidden by law. Tunnell provides a detailed review of state crime against labor
(1995). He makes the point that the role of the state has changed greatly in its work on
behalf of owners and against the working class.
Right-Wing groups committing anti-state crime which are nationwide include the Ku Klux
Klan which oppresses Afro-Americans, Jews, and most other minorities as well as
non-Christian religions; the Nazi party which is anti-Jewish and maintains Whites should
rule America; and the Aryan Brotherhood which is located in many prisons and
"protects white prisoners from black ones" (Dobratz and Shanks-Meile, 1987)
There is also an anti-abortion group which attempts to control the reproductive behavior
of women. They bomb clinics, threaten doctors and picket women who have had abortions.
Natural Law v. State Law. It is very helpful to note that much of the
rhetoric of those on the right who oppose state law by appeal to natural law. Natural law,
in this context means that law set forth in various religious texts. Those in the
Christian Coalition take the old Testament of the Christian bible as grounding for their
opposition to state law. State law has generally eroded the ancient forms of ethnic and
gender privilege sanctified in Deuteronomy and elsewhere in that text. The opposition of
state law with natural law give great moral power to those who are declassed by
affirmative action, by civil rights laws as well as by the role of the state in supporting
the internationalization of the economy in such treaties as the North American Free Trade
Alliance.
Natural law is also used in opposition of 'scientific laws' of social
organization and economics. Economists, sociologists, psychologists and other behavioral
scientists assert that the modern state should ground social policy on formal theories
derived from research. Research about the adverse effects of racism especially have
informed court and legislation since the 1950's.11 In
this grounding of state policy, natural science displaces both divine law and interest
group politics. Conservative opponents of the state take both social law and state law as
profanations of divine law. In the USA, up to 97% of the population aver belief in their
God and, by extension, the precedence of divine law over state law. Part of the reason why
liberation theology and New Age religious sensibility are so important to low crime
societies is that they expand the geometry of 'universal being' without the oppressive
features of many pre-modern religions.
HIDING STATE CRIME: There are several generic tactics by which the role of
the state in both structural and personal state crime is hidden. First there is the
selective criminalization of harmful social behavior. That behavior which supports
structures of domination are not criminalized while those which oppose class, racist or
gender privilege is defined as sedition and conspiracy.
Then too, there is a systematic concealment of political crime against the state. This
tactic produces the dramaturgical impression that there are no political prisoners in the
USA, thus there is no systematic challenge to the legitimacy of the state.
A third tactic by which the state conceals its role in political crime is by the
privatization of policing on behalf of power, wealth and status privilege. We spoke of
this tactic in the use of force against women by men in their lives. Yet it is far more
pervasive than most realize.
Another tactic involves the rise of underground structures of control and coercion which
parallel or substitute for state instruments of control. Private groups, armed and
equipped with de facto license to do violence to those who oppose inequality, arise in a
time when the state can't or won't act openly on their behalf.
A. Criminalization. Howard Zinn has given a sweeping picture of the biases
in the law making process which subvert democracy and equality (1977). He makes a well
grounded case that the criminal justice system is biased in what is defined as crime; in
what is policed as crime; in how policing is done and who is policed.
In another work, I have noted that street crime is heavily and harshly policed while white
collar crime, corporate crime and political crime are seldom policed at all (Young 1993a).
In brief, there are parallel policing systems with very different policies and processes.
White collar criminals; doctors, lawyers, professors and various brokers are policed by a
very casual peer group process. Corporations are policed, indifferently, by agencies of
the state while political crime is policed by those who are the direct engineers of it.
Criminalization of middle class and corporate crime and diversion of those cases to more
accommodating justice systems defeat recourse to the criminal justice system for those who
commit the more profitable kinds of crime.
B. Hiding Political Crime. Although the official position of the U.S.
government is that there are no political prisoners in the USA, the fact is that there
have been thousands of arrests for opposing state energy policy in the five years between
1984 and 1988 according to The Nuclear Resister (No. 60; Feb. 15, 1989).
NUCLEAR RESISTANCE ARRESTS, US AND CANADA, 1983-88
Year Total Arrests: Number of Sites: Number of Protests: |
1984 3,010 85 160 |
1985 3,300 120 170 |
1986 3,200 75 165 |
1987 5,300 70 180 |
1988 4,470 65 160 |
Other Tactics There are additional several tactics used
in the USA to hide the crimes against a state by its citizens and thus conceal the
magnitude of the resistance to state crime.
1. Controlling the Definition of Crime The first tactic is to use the law
making apparatus to define quest for social justice illegal. Laws on conspiracy, loyalty
oaths, and property rights all make opposition to the structures of domination illegal.
2. Relabelling the Crime A second way to disguise the amount of political
crime in a society is to charge political criminals with street offenses. This practice
disguises the number of political prisoners in a country.
The usual charges against those who resist and rebel on the streets include:
3. Controlling the Defense Strategy
A third way of concealing the political character of crimes committed by citizens against
its own state is to limit the kind of defense that a person charged with a crime can make.
Catherine Hunziker, 40, was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to wear an electronic
'shackle' around her ankle for 6 months. She and 318 others protested the radiation
dangers of Rocky Flats on Nagasaki Day, August 9, 1987. The protesters tried,
unsuccessfully, to use the 'Choice of Evils,' defense in which they claimed the right to
commit a lesser offense to prevent a greater crime. Rocky Flats has 43 vents which
releases low level nuclear waste materials into the air. The plutonium levels in the soil
downwind from the plant are among the highest in the world while cancer rate of neighbors
is higher than in surrounding communities. The Judge denied her right to that defense thus
denying the jury the right to judge her claim to be choosing the lesser of two evils (Denver
Post, Dec. 22, 1987). By such rule, the state allowed the a private corporation to
generate profits, in part, by endangering the health of its own citizens.
All in all, there is much political crime in the USA hidden by such tactics and thus not
included in the public agenda as lives issues upon which to seek resolution. The forms of
political crime are many.
C. Privatizing Social Control Where repression is done in private, agents of
the state need not commit crime openly (Young, 1983). The growth of private sector
policing is of interest for two reasons in any consideration of state crime. In the first
instance, when private institutions repress or oppress citizens of a state, the state can
disclaim culpability in structural crime. When repression occurs in business, schools,
factories, shops, churches and mass media and is engineered by owners, managers, and
coworkers, the legitimacy problems of the state are fewer.
In the second instance, the costs of policing on behalf of power and
privilege are transferred to the private sector. Part of the fiscal crises of the USA
today involves its expanded policing function, taking over the policing of white collar
crime and corporate crime--forms of crime traditionally neglected by law and by
sociologists of law and/or diverted to peer group review or, in the case of corporate
crime, civil suits.12
A wide variety of social control tactics are used in the private sector with
tacit or legal indulgence from the state from the use of electronic monitoring of workers
to the psycho-chemical control of homosexuals, women, children, and the working poor by
doctors and psychologists. Blacklists and administrative 'hearings' deal with dissent by
both outsiders and by insiders. Central to privatization of repression are the many layers
of unproductive supervisors who watch, warn and otherwise control the workers, competitors
and consumers on terms favorable to finance, commerce and transport. Inequalities in
wealth, status and power in the USA depend evermore heavily upon privatized policing
systems.
Private security forces in the USA out-number public officers by 50%; 1,200,000 to 800,000
or so (Spitzer and Scull, 1977). Public police cannot be trusted to police white collar
crime of lower echelon employees or customers only; they might well police the much more
costly white collar crime of top ranked executives. Even worse, they might police
corporate crime. At the same time, the state is only to happy to yield part of its
policing problems in a crime ridden society given its fiscal problems. Private courts and
private jails proliferate in a debt ridden state.
There are several problems to the privatization of social control among which are the
absence of procedural safeguards. Then too, people do not have equal powers in the
everyday politics of racist, sexist, or class organized societies. The general good tends
to get lost in the quest for private advantage; who will tend the commons if only
privately owned sheep graze on it. A far more serious problem is that there is no means to
share the point of view of others if there is no public discourse open to all persons
affected by private decisions; the genius and insight of large sectors of the population
are lost when either the state or the firm represses dissent.
By hiding political crime under different names and by locating most political repression
in the private sector, the USA creates the dramaturgical appearance of political freedom.
By using state power against dissident workers, minorities and intellectuals only during
times of economic crises, the USA further creates the image of a open and free society.
C. Underground Structures in the Democratic State.
A wide variety of underground structures in the USA operate more or less openly but
without direct support of the law or the state (Kleck, 1988). What follows is a
theoretical exposition of the conditions under which political crime moves out of the
state section and into underground structures accommodated by the state.(for more, double
click on the heading)
Right-Wing underground structures arise when we met one or more of the following conditions.
Today such underground structures include various right-wing
groups, some secret federal and state agencies, as well as employer organizations which
black ball people in business, journalism and academia. Right wing underground structures
are justice systems in that they enforce or oppose normative structures of our society.
They often police people, judge them, sentence and execute sentences...all in a unlawful,
secret way. Often, as in the case of Oklahoma City, they engage in acts of symbolic
rebellion which signal their discontent with social change engineered and/or accommodated
by the state.
Left-Wing Underground Structures have a slightly different origin. Underground
structures on the Left develop when:
A.
A portion of a population of a society is exploited
and when
B. They are excluded from the
public policy process
and when
C. They are prevented from
building parallel structures by economic or political conditions.
And when
D. They are prevented from
migrating by economic or political conditions.
ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS of all underground structures are:
Closet Groups. There are
many non-criminal underground structures in the United States including sexual, religious,
educational, economic, and artistic. Ordinarily they do not try to police others; they
simply live in a way which varies from the socially accepted institutions. They go
underground to protect themselves from social opinion and overt discrimination based on
life style.
Most underground organizations which violate the laws and constitutional guarantees in the
USA are Right-wing groups (Green, 1985). Active membership of Right-wing groups, according
to Green, number between 20,000 and 50,000 members. A Gallup Poll conducted in 1979 shows
that a much larger group of people support some of the goals of the Klan than actually
belong to it. Fully 10% of those sampled indicated they were favorable to the Klan with 3%
being highly favorable (Anti-Defamation League, 1982:24). If the group sampled is
representative of America, generally, then something like 25 million people subscribe to
white supremist views.
The most general theoretical point one can make about the existence of most underground
structures in a democratic society is that they provide a social base for the reproduction
of inequality. In doing so, they supplant--and exculpate--the state as the agent of
repression. Democratic nations, by definition, tend to eliminate the larger runs of
inequality; voting, a free press and a fairly independent academia all constrain state
crime in a society with such basic safeguards. Right-wing groups which do the dirty work
of repression in secret help maintain the kinds of inequality which a democratic society
would not otherwise support.
Progressive Rebellion and Resistance At the same time it
is equally important to understand the more progressive aspects of anger toward the state
by those on both the Right and Left. There is much in populist ideology which resonates
with democratic values and is hostile to the corporativism of the modern state.13 States rights, local governance, the right to privacy, the
growing intrusion of the modern state into every aspect of family life and into all
features of business, large and small, becomes an onerous burden to many people. Tax
policy gives especial cause for grievance against the state; especially when it is used to
subsidize the corporate interests or to disempower workers, small business persons and
local governments. Crime policy is another source of much discontent among the lower
working classes. The forms of crime committed against the middle and lower working class
are not well policed while the 'rights' of criminals are seen to take precedence over the
'rights' of victims. Given these and many more progressive populist concerns, crimes
against the state by its own people take on the status of informed resistance and
rebellion.
PREVENTING INTERNATIONAL STATE CRIME. As with preventing domestic state
crime, discussed more systematically below, prevention of International crime requires a
strong democracy, this time on a global scale. The question becomes what International
bodies are democratic enough and, at the same time, have the political means to shape
policy in the only remaining super-power. Every modern imperial government benefits from
dominance in its part of the world and requires peace elsewhere in order to enjoy the
benefits of imperialism listed above. As long as its own citizens benefit either in
finance capital or in cultural capital, the state is seen to be legitimate. But the
governments of dominated states have an enduring legitimacy problem solved, in the short
term by repression or by aligning its own citizens with it.
In any society, the general interest is served by democratic politics across all major
social institutions. At present, powerful special interests have special access to the
organs of the state either by pre-selection of candidates, by direct bribery or by an
indirect bribery in which state agents circulate from public to private employment. In
this paper, the general interest not only incorporates those at the lower reaches of the
many existing hierarchies but those still unborn. Iroquois wisdom teaches that a society
should consider the welfare of the next seven generations in its policy and in its
practices. As the world becomes more and more connected, the general interest expands to
include those at the lower rungs of hierarchy in the third world. In a transnational
economy, crime, disease, racism and sexism are as much international goods as are cars,
computers and textiles.
Allied with a general interest in democratic politics at home there is the interest of
International Capital for global peace. In order to extract profits and to ship raw
materials as well as finished goods around the world, it is necessary to have secure air
travel, communication channels, safe sea transport, labor peace and friendly governments.
Social unrest in the 160 countries which make up a globalized political economy is
inimical to these interests of capital. State governments must control unrest; if coercion
and ideological hegemony fail, then trans-national capital will by-pass that country to
invest and to trade elsewhere.
There are, however, international institutions which bear upon questions of social
justice, equality before the law, fulfillment of contracts, safe passage, human rights and
health concerns. Each of these work in a largely hostile and uncertain environment
dominated by the 'Group of Seven' rich capitalist countries which dominate the global
economy (Germany, Japan, Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada and the USA). Still these
institutions exist and speak to an interest more general than that of particular countries
and particular capitalists.
a. Public Policy Processes: International. These two sets of actors; rich
nations as well as transnational corporations, have a special, limited interest in global
peace. As mentioned earlier, the 1000 or so Transnational Corporations which now dominate
global trade buy this uneasy peace by bribery, by recourse to the military power of
imperial states or through the coercive economic power of the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, or the U.S. Agency for International Development. The
operative question for building a more authentic global peace centers around the nature
and reach of an international policy formation process with which to constrain
nation-states as well as trans-national corporations to the more general interest in
social justice.
Of the institutions in which discourse and debate about more general interests take place,
one thinks immediately of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at
the Hague and the various international bodies of which the USA is partner such at NATO,
and variously, the news media. These have been ineffective in that the USA, as the only
existing super-power dominates and/or ignores them.
The role of the various media which have reporters stationed around the
world has been mixed but the potential for de-centering ideological content in such wars
as Desert Storm and those in the former socialist countries remains. Given globalized
satellites, news programs from abroad can be viewed and considered in ways not possible
only 20 years ago.
Then too, Internet and various networks around the world provide instant news coverage and
analysis which by-passes the state and those media owned and operated by national and
trans-national capital. There are both Right-wing and Left-wing networks which maintain a
constant stream of criticism of the state. While much of the commentary on the Right
serves to reproduce racism, sexism and nationalism, still there are many commonalities
with those on the Left which call for local government, due process, equality before the
law as well as concern with big business, banking and capital flight from local
communities.16
Yarnold (1995) argues for an expanded role of the International Court for
the adjudication of disputes within a framework which serves a broader human interest than
do the local and international courts before which disputes are now brought. Following
Bassiouni (1987a), she suggests that the ICJ be given jurisdiction over both crimes of
nations and crimes of individuals who commit crime in one state and move to another. This
very controversial suggestion requires imaginative solutions to complex differences in
legal systems and in normative structures of very different cultures. However there has
been considerable work in setting forth a legal code and a procedure for adjudicating
complaints which Yarnold endorses and extends. Bassiouni (1987b), in a survey of
multilateral agreements, identified 22 categories of International crime upon which to
ground a sanctioning process.
Without denigrating such comprehensive legal institutions; corrective reactions are
necessary and, perhaps, inevitable, still the point remains, control of crime is post hoc;
with the stratification of wealth, status and power in place to mediate the sanctioning
process, the structural conditions which produce both personal crime and state crime
remain in place. My own view is that both courses, preventive and corrective, are
necessary with precedence given over to international and domestic forms of social justice
of the sort embedded in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Hurwitz (1995) adopts the European Court of Human Rights as a model for global resolution
of crime. It has much to recommend itself to proponents of International Justice; it is
well accepted by its 24 member states and it has a record of effective resolution of such
cases. A creature of the Council of Europe, it is informed specifically by a set of
conventions which cover human rights in such areas as social welfare, migrant work, and
the environment. It combines a concern with human rights with an effective juridical
structure aimed at removing the advantages of class, ethnicity and gender from the
social/criminal process. In as much as this Court is based on Human Rights, it is, in my
opinion, superior to the ICJ which may be called upon to enforce local law with all its
peculiarities. Given the structural crime embedded in local law in most states today, any
International agency which enforces such law becomes party to the crime.
Martin (1995), suggests the elimination of state crime by the elimination of the state. He
reviews five sets of ideas which equate the state with crime. Citing Weber (1947), he
notes that it is its claim to a monopoly over force which seats the state in such a way as
to encourage its inhumane use of that force. Martin dismisses most of these ideas as
unworkable; communism, libertarianism, decentralization (he calls it 'small size,' and
world government. He then pursues four forms of anarchy to the end of the elimination of
state crime and mentions a variety of social movements and social 'defence' actions which
may be prelude to a more informed anarchy in the future. Anarchy in its non-violent
oppository stance does not deal with the realities of the multinational corporate
structure which run the global economy and everyday increase their market share. Nor does
it consider bloc formation and its implications for regulation of state crime both within
and between blocs.
b. Bloc Formation. What might be helpful in controlling
super-power crime are the ten or so economic blocs in process of forming. Multi-national
blocs are now emerging to replace the nation as the unit of political and economic
organization in the globalized economy. These blocs crystalize on the bases of language,
religion and proximity (Young, 1993b). Controlling scarce but essential raw materials,
large enough to be self contained, and too large to be targeted for military action, these
blocs separately or in coalition could restrain the USA or any future military or economic
super-power.17
The day that such blocs could mediate state crime within its own bloc
appears, at this writing, to be distant. Again, the European Court serves as a case in
point. It offers redress of grievance within the European Community. However, things
happen rapidly in a time of uncertainty. I would expect that such bloc formation to be the
dominant international event of the first quarter of the 21st Century.18 I expect that the North American Free Trade Alliance (NAFTA)
will attempt to moderate both state crime and corporate crime within the bloc.
1. Opposing Transnational Crime at Home. For the most part, Americans
applaud the state when it commits international crime; most recently when the Persian Gulf
war received great public acclaim partly because the media serve as cheerleaders and thus
engineer ideological compliance and partly because they are direct beneficiaries of the
cheap food, oil, labor and favorable exchange rates which the USA forces upon the third
world (Berberoglu, 1991). However, many in the USA do not support theft from the poorest,
hungriest peoples in the world. There are several tactics used to oppose international
crime. Anti-war demonstrations and movements have been seen in every war but most
extensive in opposition to the wars in South East Asia and in Central America.
Among the more current social movements and/or underground structures working to control
the amount and kind of international crime committed by the USA include the Sanctuary
Movement, the National Mobilization for Peace and Justice Movement in Central America, the
Antinuclear Movement, the Anti-apartheid Movement, as well as various whistle blowers in
public agencies and private corporations.
These post hoc efforts, largely ineffectual, on the part of citizens to stop their own
government from committing crimes in the third world are testimony, in their impact, at
the difficulty of controlling state crime by reactive politics. Effective prevention of
international state crime would require a variety of strong democratic global bodies which
have the social and economic power to affect U.S. policy in the third world. Some of these
were mentioned above, more about these below.
CONCLUSION The central thesis of this work has been that the control of
state crime is uncertain at best in stratified societies; that state crime is best
prevented with social justice policy rather than controlled by the policing and
sanctioning of those who control the state. Prevention requires a thorough-going democracy
in all major institutions such that no one sector of the population has the social,
economic, moral or physical means to shape state policy and practice. International
treaties, informed by a Human Rights philosophy can be and should be developed to
reconstruct definitions of crime which at present serve elites and elite states. At the
same time, a postmodern religious sensibility which extends and expands the sanctification
of nature and peoples will be most helpful to the reduction of state crime.
Finally, I would like to reiterate that state engineered crime is deeply connected with
other forms of crime; street crime, organized crime, corporate crime and even white collar
crime are, to varying degrees generated by the vast inequalities in race, class, and
gender engineered and condoned by the state (Young, 1981; 1987). It is a certain dignity
and joyful participation in community life which is the measure of all social life.
REFERENCES
I Comments may be sent to: T.R. Young,
8085 Essex, Weidman, Mi., 48893. Return
1 It is important to note that much of the ideology of the militant
Right is in support of traditional gender relations; in support of racist practices and is
informed by conservative politicians who give them 'cultural capital' in lieu of health
care, job security, low interest rates or investment in infra-structure. Teggert (1941)
makes the point that the modern state 'releases' people from 'taken for granted' aspects
of everyday family, religious, ethnic and economic life developed over the long centuries
before the modern state. Such a release becomes an existential crisis in advanced
industrial societies in which more and more people become 'surplus' to the labor needs of
capital. At such times, these 'antiquated' habits, customs and practices offer a social
base for the social self (Young, 1990b). When the modern state releases wives and children
from patriarchal authority, men in the lower working class are deprived of what little
status and power remain to them. As a consequence, separatist churches and militant
organizations which restore social status inequalities have great appeal. Return
2 The term, postmodern, came into use in the 1950s in
reference to architectural styles and a critique of cubes, circles, pyramids and cones
that marked 'modern' architecture. The term was extended to literary critique of
pretensions at universal standards for novels, poetry, art, music and theater. It is used
here to denote a criminology in which all moral absolutes; all universal standards; all
claims to objective Truth and all pretensions of perfection are set aside and replaced by
a sensibility which sees both crime and morality informed by both general human interests
as well as a special political deployment of state power. In such a criminology,
definitions of crime transcend particular societies and, at the same time, refuse to
privilege humans beings, as a species, as the sole beneficiary of law since all life is
deeply interconnected and ultimately dependent upon a healthy environment. Return
3 Part of the demand for state rights was informed, of
course, by an interest in both slavery and patriarchy. Jefferson, himself, was most
ambivalent about slavery and quite certain that the place of women was in the home. While
he wrote articles to dis-mantle slavery, he kept over one hundred; all but five of whom
were sold upon his death to pay his debts. The five freed were all children of Sally
Hemings, whom he took as mistress long after the death of his beloved wife. Return
4 The G.M. strike in Flint was definitive; owners recognized that, in a
favorable market, it was possible to increase wages and benefits by passing on costs to
customers. A series of strikes just after WWII confirmed what has been called the 'grand
compromise' between labor and capital in the USA. Return
5 It is noteworthy that the U.S.A., alone among
European nations, is not signatory to many U.N. protocols relating to specific human
rights and environmental safeguards. Return
6 This improvement in housing, health care, education, political rights
and in what theologians are pleased to call 'universal being,' is very uneven. There are
grounds to argue that the marxian thesis of immiseration may still be observed.
Inequalities within the USA are growing; inequalities between rich capitalist and poor
capitalist countries increase; death and disease still take a terrible toll in 'modern'
economies. Still one must take the larger historical process into some account. Return
7 While there are problems with the parenting process, each form of
crime has complex dynamics of which socialization in childhood is a small part. Most
feminists point out that European states offer much more in the way of parenting support
than does the USA. Any society wishing to be have egalitarian gender relations, a high
tech economy and low crime society would do well to consider such. Return
8 In its liberating aspects, capitalism tends to alter
power relations between men and women for a number of reasons connected with profits and
efforts to expand markets. When women are paid less than men for the same or better labor
power, the capitalist has good reason to replace male with female labor. When the means of
production outstrip the capacity of men to purchase automobiles, cigarettes or jockey
shorts, advertisers can point commercials at women who, with their own income, can buy
such 'male' commodities. In similar fashion, ads can be directed at men to encourage them
to buy commodities previously used to signal feminine status; perfumes, hair styles,
cosmetic surgery and such. Return
9 The crimes listed by Speaker Wright included violations of: 1. the
National Security act which requires that the Reagan Administration keep Congress fully
and currently informed of covert operations; 2. the Arms Exports Control Act which
required Reagan to report the transfer of arms to Iran; 3. the same Act forbids the export
of arms to countries which support terrorism (as defined by the USA) and 4. The
Appropriations Act which prohibits the shifting of funds from one use to another,
unauthorized use. Return
10 The new science of complexity, often called Chaos
theory, teaches us that as key parameters pass critical points, uncertainty increases. As
uncertainty increases, control fails. All this is clearly demonstrated in the rich
literature in physics, chemistry, biology, and physiology. Only the behavioral sciences
have not yet mounted the research capacity to use the insights and methods of nonlinear
science. I have suggested some of the implications for behavioral sciences in a series of
papers. The one dealing with the reduced ability to control behavior is entitled
"Theory and Method for Criminology in the 21st Century." Return
11 Kenneth Clark, a psychologist testified before Congress and in
Federal Court about the harmful effects of racism on Black children. Keynsian economic
theory has informed state policy at home and abroad since the F.D. Roosevelt
administration. Utilitarian theory, after Bentham still informs crime policy.
Modernization theory, enforced by the World Bank and various transnational corporations
affect social policy in third world countries. These theories on balance dismantle racial,
gender and national privileges. Lower working class white males are the chief 'victims' of
such policy. Divine law has especial appeal when it sanctifies ethnic and gender status
honor for this segment of the population. Return
12 Failing adequate protection by the state, recourse
to civil suits for damages has exploded in the last 20 years. In many states, including
Michigan, Republicans have tried to put caps on the dollar amount of the suit. Return
13 I use the term, modern state, advisedly. The modern state, informed
by the logic of modern science, takes as its warrant, the mission to know everything,
predict everything and control everything. In postmodern political theory, especially that
informed by Chaos/Complexity theory, the role of the state in achieving order and
certainty is not only limited, but mis-guided (Young, 1992a). In this respect, both
pre-modern and postmodern political theory supports the demand to de-centralize and to
dis-empower the modern state. Return
14 Pepinsky builds upon the work of Nils Christie and
lists the structural features of low crime societies: 1) Interpersonal relations are deep
and rich, 2) Power is distributed widely, 3) Those who pass judgments are accountable to
those who are subjected to their judgments, 4) Social relations are interdependent rather
than dependent, 5) People believe each person is part of the sacred, 6) Communities should
be small and tight. [Hutterites divide into new communities when they grow much more than
100 members], 7) Choosing leaders by lot to reduce oligarchy. Pepinsky adds more features
from the work of others: a) Urban planning for architectural variety and integrity, b)
Workplace democracy to enhance accountability and the ability of the worker to be heard,
c) Popular justice in which offenders and victims work out distributive justice of the
sort elite offenders get and elite victims demand. Examples are the Neighborhood Justice
Centers in which victims and offenders mutually create justice on their own terms modeled
after Mennonite practices in Indiana. Return
15 I do not want to be read as opposing policing and
criminal justice structures. These are necessary for all forms of crime including state
crime. Given such need, Elliot Currie (1982) has set forth a series of policy
recommendations which are excellent beginnings toward social justice programs: 1)
Innovative policing tactics (foot patrols, youth patrols), 2) Greater use of middle range
sanctions (community service), 3) Supportive community milieu...especially jobs for youth,
4) Intensive job training; upgrade jobs, 5) Stronger response to domestic violence, 6)
Services for victims of domestic abuse; Currie goes on to join Pepinsky in advocating
prosocial state programs: a) Community based family support systems: health, housing,
child care, b) Improved Family planning, c) Paid work leaves and free child care, d) High
quality, early education for poor children, e) Universal and generous family support and
most important, good jobs. Return
16 President Clinton has called for strong measures to constrain
'talk-show' hosts who vigorously condemn the federal government. Rush Limbaugh, David
Gold, Gordon Liddy and others offer a critique ranging from suggestions to vote
conservative to the use of force to 'protect our rights.' Such measures further
institutionalize state power. Return
17 Corporations based in the USA requires overseas
markets since its own workers cannot buy back all of what they produce; it is depend upon
other countries for some 86 'strategic' minerals not found in sufficient quantity to fuel
the largest economic machine in the world; everyday it grows more dependent upon imported
oil and it must have cooperation to repatriate the profits which come from overseas
investments. What is true of the USA is also true of Japan and other export countries. Return
18 I appreciate that, at this writing, ethnic segmentation and
separatism appears to be the dominate theme of international politics. It seems to me that
these two trends, one toward micro-political governing units and the other, toward
macro-economic units, are not incompatible. The trend might well be greater political
autonomy for indigenous cultures together with greater economic cooperation in
transnational blocs which share a religious tradition, some language affinity, proximity
in time or status as well as an overriding interest in collective social power with which
to constrain foreign rivals and dealing with transnational corporations. Return