Abstract
Back in the late 1980s the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman took his fellow sociologists to task for their failure to pay attention to the attempt by the Nazi state to murder Europe’s Jews after 1939:Having documented the paucity of attempts to engage with the Holocaust on the part of sociologists, Bauman then posed a provocative question. That question, he said, was not ‘what we sociologists can say about the Holocaust’ so much as ‘what does the Holocaust … [say] about us the sociologists and our practice?’ Bauman insists thatAs I will demonstrate shortly, Bauman’s criticism of his fellow sociologists applies also to criminologists whose avoidance of the Holocaust has been exceeded only by the capacity of so many to avoid engaging with almost every other kind of crime of the state. It seems fitting therefore to revise Bauman and ask ‘what do crimes of the state say about criminology and the practices of criminologists?’ This is the task I undertake here. It is one in several steps and over several chapters.
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- 1.
Crimes of the state are no less striking an absence in sociology. Apart from the way the way mainstream sociology has ignored the case of the Nazi’s Final Solution, many other examples of state crime have likewise been forgotten by sociologists. In what was designed as an exhaustive and authoritative UNESCO survey of twentieth-century sociology, Smelser and Badie (1994) made no reference to the Holocaust, or to any other forms of state crime like the Soviet Terror or any of the post-1945 genocides. Smelser’s silence on this matter holds true for sociology in general. All the major figures from Parsons and Merton, through C. Wright Mills, to Foucault, Giddens, Beck and Bourdieu have steadfastly ignored the problem, a silence echoed in any number of standard sociological textbooks. As Keane (2004: 9–14) and Kalyvas (2006: 19–22) point out, cognate disciplines like political science have had some equivalent difficulties both thinking about and researching state-sponsored violence. That said a small number of distinguished sociologists and social theorists like Collins (1974), Elias (1982), Bauman (1989), Chalk and Jonassohn (1990), Mann (2005), Agamben (1997; 2005), Keane (1996, 2004) and Sofsky (1997, 2003) have made important contributions to this field of studies. Mann’s work in particular offers an important sociological contribution to making sense of murderous ethnic cleansing ‘as a central problem of our civilization, our modernity and our attempts to introduce democracy’ (2004: ix).
- 2.
Cohen (2000: 280–7) clearly acknowledges what he calls ‘intellectual denial’ but unaccountably chooses to ignore the central evasion by his fellow criminologists. Instead, he picks a soft target, the ‘anti-realist, morally nihilist’ deconstruction theorists and post-modernists. Given the explicit empiricism of most ‘conventional’ criminologists, conservatives and progressives alike, Cohen has a sizeable job in front of him to explain how come his past and present peers could not see what was in front of them. We might add that the famed value-neutrality of the social science research tradition leaves them as culpable as those post-modernists who refuse to take ethical issues seriously.
- 3.
Among important monographs, see Grabosky (1989), Barak (1990, 1991), Friedrichs (1996), Miller (1992), Tunnell (1993), Kauzlarich and Kramer (1995), Ross (1995, 2000, 2002, 2012), Simon (1996, 1999), Jamieson (1998), Cohen (2000), Green and Ward (2004), Kofele-Kale (2006), Rothe and Ross (2008), Rothe (2009), Hagan (2010), Savelsberg (2010), Laslett (2011) and Nivette (2014). There have also been important edited books, such as Barak (1991), Friedrichs (1998), Kramer and Michalowski (2005), Smeulers and Haveman (2008), Chambliss et al. (2010) Rothe and Mullins (2011), Stanley and McCulloch (2012), South et al. (2013), Chambliss et al. (2013) and Rothe and Kauzlarich (2014).
- 4.
In selecting Cohen, Green and Ward I do not assume that their work would either be endorsed by other criminologists of state crime, or that their work is in any sense necessarily exemplary of contemporary criminology. Their work simply offers good, convenient and recent examples of the way certain frames centring on the idea of ‘deviance’ have been put to use in trying to make sense of state crime. Clearly, one obstacle to generalizing about criminology is suggested when Garland highlights the radical eclecticism of the problems and the styles of research now found in criminology. As he notes, criminology investigates a very large array of problems and does so using a range of research methods and data sets of every description, and draws on a wide spectrum of theoretical perspectives as well as disciplines like sociology, psychology, law, history, anthropology, public health, biology, economics, and political science. That eclecticism parallels ‘competing visions of what criminology ought to be—criminology as experimental science; criminology as social science; criminology as policy prescription; criminology as security management; criminology as criminal justice training; criminology as public discourse’ (Garland 2009: 117).
- 5.
Though it is a major point to be developed later, this definition seems to beg so many questions when applied to state crime as to not warrant too much scrutiny: for one thing a good deal of state crime is carried out in secret so that it lacks an audience willing and able to declare it ‘deviant’ or it is carried out in the full light of day initially to general acclaim and only later comes to be seen for what it is: in either case there is a lag effect which vitiates the very point of this definition.
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Watts, R. (2016). Criminology and Crimes of the State. In: States of Violence and the Civilising Process. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49941-7_2
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