State Crime ─ Governments, Violence and Corruption

Defining state crime as "state organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights," Green (law and criminology, U. of Westminster, UK) and Ward (law, De Montfort U. Leicester, UK) provide an overview of various aspects of state crime that is seemingly designed to provide a grounding for the incorporation of the concept of state crime into the field of criminology. Individual chapters discuss corruption, state-corporate crime, state responsibility for natural disasters, police crime, organized crime and the state, state terror and terrorism, torture, war crimes, and genocide. A final chapter on "Iraq and its Liberators" supports the authors' claim that they try to avoid bias towards exposing wrongdoing in advanced democracies, while not suggesting that poor or authoritarian states hold a monopoly over state crime. Distributed in the US by University of Michigan Press. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)