Statsorganiserad brottslighet – kriminologiskt försummat? En innehållsanalys av svenska kriminologiutbildningars kurslitteratur

Sammanfattning: State crime is a neglected area within the academic doctrine of criminology; a fact which has been determined several times in the US, but also in Sweden. The aim for this thesis is to determine in what prevalence and in what way state crime is a part of Swedish university educations in criminology by examining its course literature. In total 336 unique works have been examined in a content analysis with three steps, both qualitative and quantitative, from a list of key words and five guiding questions. From this, the result was that 21 works included state crime, which is 6 % of the total amount of literature. By a further investigation of these 21 writings, the prevalence of pages of relevance of state crime was determined to be 3 %. Considering this fact combined with earlier research; I cannot understand the results as something other than a neglect of state crime within the course literature in criminology at Swedish university institutions. State crime is often presented in a context of critical and/or Marxist criminology. Recurrent examples of state crime in the literature are genocide, corruption, bribery, crimes against the humanity etcetera. The analysis suggests that what is being studied within the academic doctrine of criminology is affected by the legislation, and the state has a monopoly of defining crimes in the law. In this thesis, a Marxist-inspired perspective has been applied to explain the neglect by implying that the state is subordinated by the ruling class; and they are trying to afflict the working class by making the legislation focused on crimes which are often committed by the working class.