Chapter Two discussed in detail the nature of states and how they rarely live up to the ideal. It did so by engaging with Williams’ (2010, p741) assertion that it is states more than individual actors or any other grouping that commit crimes of a magnitude far in excess of anything else. The chapter documented the multifarious challenges of trying to locate and define state crime and immoral acts. Indeed, such definitions are problematic precisely because (in Western democracies at least) we have become accustomed to the state as being the key agency for law-making, for law enforcement and for defining what constitutes criminal behaviour.

Chapter Three picks up on this theme, but suggests that one of the main difficulties in delineating state criminality from other forms of crime is that many forms of criminality involve the collusion of state and other non-state, but nonetheless powerful, actors. With this in mind, the present chapter starts with a discussion of the difficulties in applying a label to what we termed in the introduction ‘nonconventional criminality’. We use this as a generic term to describe non-street-based offences. State crime would be one example but, as we shall see, there are others.

The difficulties in labelling certain offences can be traced back to the seminal work of Edwin Sutherland (1949) on white-collar crime. Although Sutherland never meant the category to be definitive, it is clear that it has led to a degree of conceptual ambiguity. It is the task of this chapter to start to cut a swathe through this dense thicket. In doing so, we are somewhat selective in the crimes we discuss, but have chosen to concentrate on those that sit at the boundaries of state crime, sometimes overlapping.

Here we focus on organised criminality and corporate criminality. With the former, we discuss the nature of organised criminality. We note at this point that the state can be seen to be complicit in organised crime in two main ways: first in the construction of the concept and its associated features, which provide a platform for the proliferation of state intimidation against certain groups; second, through complicity and collusion in illegal acts. We consider the pervasive nature of corporate criminality and state acquiescence contra to its documentation in the official accounts of crime prevalence crimes against corporations.