An analysis of state crime: negotiating multiple insecurities around the U.S. Mexico Border

This research looks into forms of state crime taking place around the U.S.-Mexico border. On the Mexican side of the border violent corruption and criminal activities stemming from state actors complicity with drug trafficking organisations has produced widespread violence and human casualty while forcing many to cross the border legally or illegally in fear for their lives. Upon their arrival on the U.S. side of the border, these individuals are treated as criminal suspects. They are held in immigration detention facilities, interrogated and categorised as inadmissible ‘economic migrants’ or ‘drug offenders’ only to be denied asylum status and deported to dangerous and violent zones in Mexico. These individuals have been persecuted and victimised by the state during the 2007-2012 counter narcotic operations on one side of the border while criminalised and punished by a categorizing anti-immigration regime on the other side of the border. This thesis examines this border crisis as injurious actions against border residents have been executed by the states under legal and illegal formats in violation of criminal law and human rights conventions. The ethnographic research uses data to develop a nuanced understanding of individuals’ experiences of state victimisation on both sides of the border. In contributing to state crime scholarship it presents a multidimensional theoretical lens by using organised crime theoretical models and critical criminology concepts to explain the role of the state in producing multiple insecurities that exclude citizens and non-citizens through criminalisation processes.

The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 or the Health and Safety (Offences) Act 2008: corporate killing and the law

This thesis examines the regulatory and legislative approach taken in the United Kingdom to deal with deaths arising from work related activities and, in particular, deaths that can be directly attributed to the behaviour of corporations and other organisations. Workplace health and safety has traditionally been seen in the United Kingdom as a regulatory function which can be traced to the very earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. With an emphasis on preventing workplace accidents and ill-health through guidance, advice and support, the health and safety legislation and enforcement regime which had evolved over the best part of two centuries was considered inadequate to effectively punish corporations considered responsible for deaths caused by their activities following a series of disasters in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. To address this apparent inadequacy, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 was introduced creating the offence of corporate manslaughter and corporate homicide. Based on a gross breach of a relevant duty of care resulting in the death of a person, the Act effectively changed what had previously considered a matter of regulation, an approach that had obvious weaknesses and shortcomings, to one of crime and criminal law. Whether this is the best approach to dealing with deaths caused by an organisation is challenged in this thesis and the apparent distinction between ‘criminal’ and ‘regulatory’ offences is also examined. It was found that an amended Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 to include a specific offence of corporate killing, in conjunction with the Health and Safety (Offences) Act 2008 would almost certainly have resulted in a more effective approach to dealing with organisations responsible for causing deaths as consequence of their activities. It was also found that there was no substantive difference between ‘regulatory’ and ‘criminal’ law other than the stigma associated with the latter, and that distinction would almost certainly disappear, at least in the context of worker safety, as a consequence of the penalties available following the introduction of the Health and Safety (Offences) Act 2008.