Structural inequality
May 27, 2025
Introducing ‘crime’ and ‘harm’
May 27, 2025
Criminology and Hurricane Katrina: understanding ‘natural disasters’
Legalistic approaches are grounded in the assumptions that the law and criminal justice systems should be used to define crime, determine whether offences have taken place and determine what redress (if any) victims are entitled to (similarly to traditional criminological approaches). It assumes that any government failings can be identified through the criminal justice system and the law can be used to establish any entitlement to compensation.
John Culhane (2007) has argued that these failures should be understood in terms of negligence on the part of the government and remedied through the provision of compensation in accordance with existing law (this could be through state law or an international law or agreement).
On the other hand, Kelly Faust and David Kauzlarich (2008) suggest that excess victimisation caused by such natural disasters constitute ‘state crimes of omission’. Usually, this is seen as resulting from a failure of government to protect citizens from harms that it has a duty to protect them from, and, in relation to Hurricane Katrina, Faust and Kauzlarich found that significant failures of ‘expected governmental duties to protect life and property, [to] address known and profound hazards to communities, and to responsively and humanely deliver services after catastrophes’, and thus that Hurricane Katrina can be considered a ‘state crime of omission’ (Faust and Kauzlarich, 2008, pp. 86–7, 98).
As as been suggested, not all social problems (such as ‘natural disasters’) are easily captured by the idea of ‘crime’, but we might still have a responsibility to question ‘natural disasters’ and their impacts, and where they should fit in with how researchers examine crime and harm. It might be tempting to think of such ‘natural’ events as no business of criminology, for example to suggest that, although shocking and socially harmful, they are ‘unavoidable’.
Zemiologists, however, may examine the context surrounding a ‘natural disaster’, the underlying reasons why harm results from such ‘natural’ events, and how this links to inequalities between social groups. This may result in a finding that the disaster was not random, and was actually avoidable, with some arguing that ‘[t]here is no such thing as a natural disaster’ (Hartman and Squires, 2006a).
Hurricane Katrina, one of the strongest and most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history, made international news headlines initially because of the damage it caused. However, questions were also raised over the adequacy of government preparation and responses to it. The hurricane first made landfall in the U.S. state of Florida on 25 August 2005 and intensified as it moved over the Gulf of Mexico, particularly affecting the states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
It has been described as not only ‘the costliest’ hurricane ever recorded in the U.S., but also its ‘deadliest’ since 1928, with a government estimated death toll of 1,833, and estimated financial costs of $151 billion (United States Census Bureau, 2015). Reportedly 711,698 people were acutely affected by flooding and/or structural damage (Crowley, 2006, p. 123).
Power can be used to influence the actions of the criminal justice system and the state, ideas about what is harmful and what constitutes crime. Issues of power are integral to all critical understandings of crime and justice. For example, many critical criminologists argue that actions by powerful individuals, social groups and organisations are much less likely to be defined as illegal than those committed by the less powerful.
Similarly, the more powerful individuals, groups and organisations are, when they break the law, the less likely they are to be prosecuted and convicted for crimes. Power differences are one form of inequality, but they in turn are grounded in other forms of inequality
For example, economic inequality gives some social groups and institutions more chance of exercising power than others. In particular wealthy multinational corporations are powerful actors in their own right and they can also influence the actions of states.The social harm approach (which is also known as zemiology), however, provides an alternative approach which goes beyond criminology in focusing on harm rather than crime.
Proponents of the social harm approach argue that crime has no coherent or distinctive characteristic as a category. Illegal acts are sometimes harmful, but not always, and conversely there are many legal acts which are very harmful indeed.
Thus zemiology argues that any activity, process or set of circumstances that is harmful or damaging is a potentially important focus of analysis, whether or not it happens to be against the law (Hillyard and Tombs, 2007).
A transnational or global focus can be found in some criminology, but the social harm approach lends itself particularly well to the study of harmful actions, policies and events which are not confined within individual countries. For example, harms done to the environment often cross national boundaries, and international or global organisations (for example transnational corporations) are often involved in producing uncriminalised harms.
By providing an alternative to criminology, advocates of the social harm approach claim that their approach can better investigate issues of injustice and harm, including globally oriented ones, such as threat to the ecological survival of the planet, genocide, war, abuse of human rights, nuclear proliferation and so on. The examples considered in this course, namely Hurricane Katrina, imprisonment, and the ‘War on Terror’, will enable you to study these aspects through both criminological and social harm approaches. This will also show how global activities affect individuals, such as how seemingly ‘local’ places (such as specific prisons) and ‘local’ processes (such as the impacts and outcomes from Hurricane Katrina) may in fact be globally shaped. In doing this, the course will provide you with an example of studying crime, justice and social harm at postgraduate level.
