State Corporate Crime: capitalism as a criminal activity.

 Criminology ignored Sutherland’s ideas until the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. That produced a new generation that combined Marxism with Social Constructivism to focus on organisations to identify the crimes of the powerful. 

Quinney, for example, used a hybrid-level analysis to advance the field. First, he split white-collar crime into two. Corporate, driven by organisational goals; and occupational, for personal gain. Second, he noted the state's role, influenced by corporations, and the law in defining certain things as criminal to protect capitalism. 

Chambliss (1989), meanwhile, introduced us to the idea of state-organised crime. He defined it as secret and illegal actions driven by a state’s organisational goals. The Iran-Contra scandal is one such example.

There was one flaw in the field's development at this time: both sides investigated in isolation (see Kramer et al 2002.267). For an example of the that, we can look at Chambliss’s (1989:4,7) work on Iran-Contra. While he references the private sector working with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Cold War, he only refers to the former’s subordinate position to the state. Now, with the declassification of intelligence documents in the late 1990s, we know how mutually beneficial the state-corporate relationship was during the Cold War. 

To rectify this issue, Kramer and Michalowski (qtd in Kramer et al. 2002:269-272) developed the concept of state-corporate crime in the late 1980s. This theory integrated Quinney's corporate focus with Chambliss's attention to the state. Further, in a nod to Sutherland and Quinney's musings on the harms that corporations produce, they explored legal, but deviant, activities that produce social harm (qtd in Kramer et al. 2002:266). With this, the pair identified how a state actor, the US space agency NASA, and a corporation, Morton Thiokol, Inc., collaborated to produce the space shuttle Challenger crash in 1986.

As criminology entered the 21st century, this strand of thought re-focused the definition of crime to include individual, organisational and structural factors. This countered the bias of the older models based on legal ones, but two issues remained. Those, according to Mullins and Rothe (2007:137-138), were continued weaknesses in defining crime and a lack of an international level of analysis.

References:

Chambliss, W.J. (1989). State-organized crime-The American Society of Criminology, 1988 Presidential Address*. Criminology. 27 (2). pp. 183–208.

Kramer, R.C., Michalowski, R.J. & Kauzlarich, D. (2002). The origins and development of the concept and theory of state-corporate crime. Crime & Delinquency. 48 (2). pp. 263–282.

Mullins, C.W. & Rothe, D.L. (2007). The forgotten ones: The Dafuri genocide. Critical Criminology. 15 (2). pp. 135–158.