Swimming Upstream: Teaching State Crime to Students at American Universities

Abstract

Over the past two decades, a growing number of criminologists have conducted rigorous research on state crime and have tried to disseminate it widely by developing academic courses that specifically address crimes of the state. However, teaching this subject, like other controversial matters, is not as straightforward as some might expect. This paper presents a framework for understanding the teaching of state crime in undergraduate and graduate programs in American universities. In order to convey the current experience, the authors surveyed colleagues who have conducted research on state crime and taught courses on this subject matter, and then analyzed the results. Based on these findings, the writers conclude that the demands of the criminology and criminal justice curriculum, the focus on “mainstream” street crime in these course offerings, and the general practitioner‐oriented goals of our students prevent the wide‐scale adoption of classes on state‐crime and serve to have it marginalized in the typical American university.

Acknowledgments

This paper is derived from an earlier one written and presented by the first author at the British Society of Criminology Meetings in Glasgow, Scotland, on July 6, 2006. Special thanks to Catherine Leidemer, the anonymous reviewers of this journal for comments, and to the respondents to our survey.

Notes

1. State crime has been defined as any action that violates international public law, and/or a states’ own domestic law when these actions are committed by individual actors acting on behalf of, or in the name of, the state (Rothe and Mullins 2006:2–3).

2. The survey was conducted informally and generated additional comments through the snowball method with an 80 percent response rate. We also drew from several conversations we have shared with our colleagues.

3. Readers should note that this is not a traditional survey where questions were chosen because they would minimize problems of validity and reliability; nor was there any sort of pretesting in order to fine‐tune the instrument as typically associated with surveys aimed at generalizing and/or for any type of multivariate statistical analysis.

4. Frank Pearce (personal communication July 2006).