Criminology and Crimes of the State

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.