ABSTRACT
State power and corporate power are inseparable from each other. The state actively produces and facilitates crimes of the powerful – including but not limited to organized crime, white-collar crime, and corporate harms. State-organized crime, then, is precisely that: a series of processes where the state legally and politically organizes crime and social harms. The state represents the various arenas where criminal laws are generated, along with the resources (e.g., funding, personnel) for their enforcement. Indirectly, the state thus organizes popular understandings of “crime” and “criminals” by politically and conceptually operationalizing these concepts in legally actionable ways. In this way, we can claim that a society has as much crime as it generates, or as much crime as it legislates and adjudicates.
The state – along with its processes of criminal law creation and enforcement – directly contribute to the obfuscation of corruption and crimes of the powerful. By defining some activities as criminal acts, others inevitably get left out and thus generate far less attention and institutional resources.
This is part of the reason why crimes of the powerful are generally beyond the purview of formal criminal justice oversight.
This chapter delves into these and other key concepts and perspectives that are central to the arguments laid out in the book. I begin by outlining foundational socio-legal concepts in the United States and I define “the state” for criminological analysis. For an interdisciplinary readership, I make clear how I am approaching the study of nightlife economies, crime, power, and the relationship between alcohol and crimes of the powerful.
The second half of the chapter is a vignette for how the sociological imagination can be applied towards studying nightlife spaces and the ways that powerful interests and powerful systems shape our experience. I conclude the chapter with a summary of key points.
