ABSTRACT
In exercising state power, legitimacy is derived and maintained through regulatory processes underpinned by the 'rule of law'. In Germany in the 1930s, the rise and consolidation of the Third Reich, using state powers and authority to impose a programme of selective internment, and to then legitimate systemic genocide – eliminating Jews, Roma, communists, homosexuals and others labelled 'alien' – remains the starkest contemporary illustration of institutionalized state crime directed inward towards its citizens. Its occupation and annexation of neighbouring states, exporting terror, torture and the Holocaust, remains an unequivocal demonstration of state crime directed outward across sovereign borders. 'Crimes' are also perpetrated against citizens or non-citizens by democratic states within their borders. Chambliss agreed, warning that criminologists had neglected 'state-organized crime' and crimes of the powerful in their persistent preoccupation with community-based organized crime and crimes of the poor.
