State Corporate Crime: Wrong Doing at the Intersection of Business and Government

This book is an opportunity to discover this field of research for those are not familiar to it. The two editors are two experimented scholars. Raymond J. Michalowski is the Arizona Regents Professor at Northern Arizona University and Ronald C. Kramer is the Director of the criminal justice program and a Professor of Sociology at Western Michigan University. Since their first publication on SCC in 1990, they have rejoined by other scholars.

In State Corporate Crime: Wrong Doing at the Intersection of Business and Government Raymond J. Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer bring together 15 essays to show that those in positions of political and economic power frequently operate in collaboration, and are often all too willing to sacrifice the well‐being of the many for the private profit and political advantage of the few.

This collective book is opened by “The critique of power” written by Michalowski and Kramer. It is followed by “The original formulation” by Kramer and Michalowski. Those two introductive chapters bring the conceptual roots of the book. These are completed by 12 scholars' contributions that can be considered as case studies or essays: “The Space Shuttle Challenger example of SCC” is written by Kramer. Judy Aulette and Raymond J. Michalowski examine the case of the fire in the imperial food products chicken processing plant in Hamlet (North California). In the “Nuclear weapons production” David Kauzlarich and R.C. Kramer show that the Department of Energy – and the firms that contracted with it – have been allowed to work in extreme secrecy, unfettered by the regulations that had the governed the civilian nuclear industry. “The crash of Valujet Flight 592” is discussed by R.A. Matthews and D. Kauzlarich. “Globalization, SCC, and women” by N.A. Wonders and M.J. Danner brings a global and female point of view of the SCC question. With “Ordinary business in Nazi Germany” Rick A. Matthews recalls us that the Nazi Germany was also matter of “business as usual.” The trouble relations between a public agency and constructors are explored in “Bridgestone‐Firestone, Ford, and the NHTSA” by Christopher W. Mullins. “The Exxon Valdez oil spill” chapter (by Tricia Cruciotti and Rick A. Matthews) tackles with the ecological dimension of SCC. In “Enron‐era economics versus economic democracy,” the two editors, Kramer and Michalowki, introduce a more political approach of the SCC. That is also the case for the three following chapters: “Violations of treaty rights” by Linda Robyn, “The invasion of Iraq” by Kramer and Michalowski and “Iraq and Halliburton” by Dawn Rothe. The last chapter: “Taking stock of theory and research” by David Kauzlarich and Rick A. Matthews is an overview of the researches in the field.

Globally, this collective book is a witness for those who have suffered, those who have died, and those who have contributed to the greatest human and environmental devastations of our time. It also reminds us that the most serious threats to public health, security, and safety are not those petty crimes that appear nightly on local news broadcasts, but rather are those that result from corruption among the wealthiest and most powerful members of society. The two main lesson are: “big power=big crime” and elites crimes are often unpunished or under punished crime, old lessons already underlined in Esope's fables! Scholarly speaking, it is a good introduction to the SCC concept and field of research.