STATE CRIME

A Case Study: State Crime



A Case Study: State Crime

Introduction

There is no doubt that the phenomenon of offense and crime is one of the most dangerous social phenomena that threaten the human race in its security and stability, and even his life. Crime is a core set of behaviours such as killings (murders and manslaughters), inflicting significant injuries (various kinds of assaults), forcible or abusive sexual relations (rape), stealing (theft or larceny, and if by force or threat of force, robbery), serious cheating (fraud), entering the property with bad motive (burglary). Barak (1991, 85) states that, the crime is an integral part of our society. Millions of people around the world face severe abuses specifically related to human rights such as force labour, physical and sexual abuse, under international law every abuse in future constitute torture. The executors of criminal behaviours do not only include traditional culprits like individual conducting crime, undemocratic and authoritarian regimes, but they also include so called liberal democracy nations.

Or we can say that along with individuals and group of people, states of a nation are also involved in committing crime or we can say that they are also engaged in criminal activities. According to the law, a nation as an entity cannot commit a crime but the government of that nation can commit crime, frequently and without the support and knowledge of nation's people. Till now, the majority of academic research has focused in crimes and illegal actions of organizations and individuals (i.e., corporations and syndicates). Thus, in this paper I am going to discuss the concept of state crime and case study of state crime that will help readers in exploring the parameters and horizons of State Crime in criminological landscape. According to Taylor (2006),State crime can not be controlled by effective social control. The case study in this paper is relayed to the criminal behaviour of United States against Iraq. This research initially aims to present brief history of organized crime then it proceeds with the definition of state crime along with a look at international law as it is related to the state crime including war crimes. Thus research focuses on Michalowski and Kramer's four types of war crimes: indiscriminate killing of Iraq resistance, the failure to protect civilians, abuse of Iraq prisoners, and illegal transformation of economy of Iraq. The purpose of this paper is to study crime that helps us to understand the nature of the crime, where the results of his research to help community leaders and law enforcement officials in their efforts to prevent crime.

State Crime

In criminological landscape, state crime is defined as failure to act or activity that breaks the public international law or the criminal law of its own state. Initially the state of nation was considered as a deterrence agency that used to use threat of punishment to shape citizen's behaviour. However with the passage of time, state became a mediator, interpreting the wishes for conflict resolution of ...