There is a dearth of criminological scholarship on how the political persuasions of governments affect Indigenous people as it relates to human rights and environmental consequences, whether positive or negative, for Indigenous peoples. To address this gap, we develop a comparative instrumental case study of the policies concerning Indigenous peoples implemented during two political periods in Brazil: the administrations of presidents Silva (2003–2010) and Rousseff (2011–2016) and the administrations of Temer (2016–2018) and Bolsonaro (2019–). We explore the consequences for Indigenous peoples of these leftist and the right-wing governments. We argue that governments of both political leanings victimize Indigenous populations, with leftist governments using structural violence and right-wing governments engaging additionally in symbolic and direct violence.
The core claim of this article is that critical criminology offers us an especially potent framework for interpreting state-corporate crime with the health care industry in the United States as one illustrative case, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. The unprecedented, surreal pandemic crisis that surfaced in 2020 brought into especially sharp relief many of the core claims of critical criminology in relation to domination, inequality and injustice within a contemporary capitalist political economy, while it also raised the need to broaden critical criminology studies to incorporate the specificities of the health care systems and the pharmaceutical industry. Following this challenge, the article proposes to foster a “critical health criminology” within state-corporate crime research. To do so, this article explores the “big picture” in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and reveals how it can be understood as a criminological phenomenon. Such a project incorporates the identification of some conceptual issues requiring attention in relation to advancing an enriched form of criminological analysis in these times, and toward building a foundation for a more fully realized twenty-first century criminology.
The phrases, “essential businesses” and “essential jobs,” emerged at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, raising questions about and reflecting concerns over which goods, services, and workers were necessary to prevent societal collapse. In an attempt to continue to probe “essentiality,” this article coins the term “essential crimes” to refer to those socially injurious acts and omissions that are part and parcel of a global neoliberal capitalist order, and that are, therefore, vital to keep the socioeconomic system running. In other words, if keeping humans alive in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic required supermarkets and hospitals to remain open (“essential business and jobs”), maintaining the existing socioeconomic system and ensuring that the powerful remained powerful required harmful acts and omissions by states and corporations—what we refer to as “essential crimes.” This article sheds light on how the COVID-19 pandemic has helped illuminate just how essential these crimes and harms are to the perpetuation of the status quo by the powerful. In addition, this article encourages us to consider which punishments, if any, are vital to a well-ordered society, and it demands that we rethink whether prison is an “essential punishment” for ensuring public safety.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.