Systematic crimes of the powerful: criminal aspects of the global economy.

• Date: 22 March 2006
• Author: Mackenzie, Simon
• Published date: 22 March 2006
• Author: Mackenzie, Simon

The Criminological Contours of Global Poverty

AT THE G8 SUMMIT IN GLENEAGLES IN JULY 2005, LEADERS OF THE WORLD'S eight richest countries finally agreed to write off 100% of the debt owed by 18 of the world s poorest countries, totaling around $40 billion. Such apparent altruism gives us pause to consider the historical development of these international debts, and the political economy, which may help us to give context to the generosity of the G8. The agreement to write off these debts came under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, which links debt forgiveness to the implementation and maintenance of macroeconomic, poverty-reduction, and structural reform policies satisfactory to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In total, 38 countries are currently considered HIPCs; debt-relief campaigners argue that the total should be 62. It is difficult not to praise this debt relief, insufficient as it may be, knowing that it will save lives. As it is linked to the policy requirements of the World Bank and the IMF, however, we should ask whether these policies are themselves helpful in relieving poverty, and whether they have systematically beneficial outputs to poor countries, to rich countries, or are neutral in this regard. Or, more tersely, do we agree that "a man is benefiting his wife if he beats her up ever less frequently" (Pogge, 2004: 273)?

Almost half of the world's population (47%) together earn one-quarter percent of global income. Not one quarter of global income--which in itself might seem iniquitous--but one-quarter percent. One-fifth of the world's population exist in conditions of abject poverty (Kim et al., 2000). The harms caused by such massive poverty are manifold, and avoidable:

We confront poverty statistics such as these: out of a total of 6 billion human beings, some 2.8 billion live below $2/day, and nearly 1.2 billion of them live below the $1/day international poverty line. 799 million are undernourished, 1 billion lack access to safe water, 2.4 billion lack access to basic sanitation, and 876 million adults are illiterate. More than 880 million lack access to basic health services. Approximately 1 billion have no adequate shelter and 2 billion no electricity. Two out of five children in the developing world are stunted, one in three is underweight, and one in ten is wasted ... Roughly one-third of all human deaths, some 50,000 daily, are due to poverty-related causes, easily preventable through better nutrition, safe drinking water, vaccines, cheap re-hydration packs, and antibiotics (Pogge, 2004: 265-266). The analysis in this article begs two key questions. First, do we need to argue for the inclusion within criminology of some forms of currently noncriminal harm to conduct a criminological analysis of the global economy? That is, must we move beyond state definitions of crime to conduct a satisfactory critique of this type? Second, what is to be gained by arguing that harms consequent upon the workings of the global economy are or are not "crimes"?

Friedrichs and Friedrichs (2002) have addressed these questions in a criminological case study of the World Bank's building of a dam in Thailand. This study serves as the point of departure for the present inquiry, being as far as I am aware the first systematic attempt to analyze the actions of one of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) as "a form of crime and a criminological phenomenon" (Ibid.: 13). In many ways, this approach is the natural extension of a respectable tradition acknowledging the artifice of the category of crime and its susceptibility to influence (including Sellin, 1938; Sutherland, 1940, 1945, 1949; Aubert, 1952; Becker, 1963; Geis, 1968; Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1970; Cohen, 1972, 1993; Taylor, Walton, and Young, 1973; Reiman, 1979; Messner and Rosenfeld, 1994; Slapper and Tombs, 1999; Taylor, 1999; Christie, 2004-one could go on). Although not all the writers in this category have called for the detailed study by criminologists of extralegal harm, the case has been recurrently made, most notably for the purposes of this article in a recent collection of essays that tempt us to look "beyond criminology" (Hillyard et al., 2004) and by the Friedrichs in relation to the World Bank's Thai dam.

The Friedrichs accurately note the different positions that have been taken on discarding a legal definition of crime as our dependent variable. These run the gamut from the traditional to the expansive. In general order of increasing expansion, they might be categorized as: those that resist all attempts to go beyond the official label (Tappan, 1947); those that would include some violations of the civil law as proper objects of study for the criminologist (Sutherland, 1945); those that argue for the inclusion of breaches of international law and convention (Michalowski and Kramer, 1987; Kauzlarich, Kramer, and Smith, 1992); those that argue for attention to directly harmful deviation from widely recognized human rights standards (Cohen, 1993; Green and Ward, 2000; Ward and Green, 2000); and those that prefer a fully humanistic re-conception of criminality as a violation of human rights as that term is conceptualized by the authors rather than as it may be generally agreed (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1970; Tifft and Sullivan, 1980; Sullivan and Tifft, 1998).

The definition of "crime" Friedrichs and Friedrichs (2002: 17) adopt is close in position to that of Cohen, and Green and Ward; according to the Friedrichs, "if IFIs adopt policies and practices that violate the provisions of international human rights accords and covenants, they may be said to be complicit in a form of crime." It is not my contention that we cannot, or should not, consider breaches of international law or convention when considering the question of the "crimes" of the IFIs. International human rights law provides clear standards of conduct and a mechanism for the enforcement of those standards against ratifying states and the nonstate actors within them. Where breaches of those standards cause harm, a strong argument can be made, as the Friedrichs have done, for invocation of the term "crime."

Without discounting the importance of international human rights law, I wish to focus on a different dimension, that of domestic state law:

The nation-state, through its organizational structures and state managers, has historically engaged in numerous violations of its own criminal and civil laws, as well as various forms of international law. Many of these state crimes have been exceedingly violent, destructive, and costly (Kramer, 1995: 43, emphasis added). In my argument, domestic state law is conceived as a bounded, insular artifact, something pre-international that consists of an internal statement of moral and practical norms for a given society; it is a fiction in some respects (although not so much as we might imagine), given the increasing number of domestic laws that are implemented in observance of some kind of international obligation. Delineation of this domestic artifact enables me to produce an even simpler argument for the application of the criminal label than one that uses international law: an argument that does not dismiss the importance of international legal and moral regimes in the control of IFIs, but puts such matters temporarily to one side in a search for fundamental and historically entrenched principles of domestic criminal law that might help to clarify the question of what, morally and legally, the IFIs and the states that operate through them are doing. Therefore, reliance on extending the definition of crime to cover breach of international conventions, along with other breaches of human rights standards, is unnecessary to this level of analysis.

Domestic criminal laws provide standards of conduct with which we might hope the states that designed and implemented them should comply. One can analyze the circumstances leading to harm as if the state actor were bound by the rules of its own domestic criminal code, referring to any given state's promulgation of what it pertains to be universalizable norms. The state that breaches its own code is hoist by its own petard.

As to the second question--the "why?" or perhaps the "so what?" of this approach--I wish simply to add my own small contribution to the various persuasive arguments that have been made elsewhere (e.g., Pearce and Tombs, 1998: Chapters 7 and 9; Tombs, 2004: 176). To focus on the etiology of crime without an adequate appreciation of the etiology of harm that maps in important respects onto official definitions of crime is, as the saying goes, to look for one's keys only in the lamplight because the light is better there, even though they may not have been lost there. The concept of the "systematic" crime, upon which this article is based, appears to hold much importance for the future of critical criminology. It does not allow all of the grandiose elements of harmful activity that contravene the value structures underpinning certain domestic criminal laws--its scale, context, persistence, and routineness; the foundations of neutralization and denial underpinning its supposed legitimacy and/or inevitability; its perverse ignorance of history, justice, and fairness; or the interests vested in its continuity: to provide an ideological barrier to the fair application of the criminal label.

Below I examine the origins of the IFIs as the central components of the contemporary global economy, illustrate with examples some of the harm their policies and procedures have caused, and relate these harms to relevant provisions of the domestic laws of England and Wales on murder and gross negligence manslaughter. The values these laws seek to uphold--of action that is responsible in respect of the physical integrity of others and of civic duty that requires the neutralization of dangerous externalities that appear as...