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      COVID-19 and the U.S. Health Care Industry: Towards a “Critical Health Criminology” within State Crime Studies

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            Abstract

            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.

            Content

            Author and article information

            Journal
            10.2307/j50005552
            statecrime
            State Crime Journal
            Pluto Journals
            2046-6056
            2046-6064
            1 April 2021
            : 10
            : 1 ( doiID: 10.13169/statecrime.10.issue-1 )
            : 126-146
            Affiliations
            [1 ] University of Scranton
            [2 ] Freie Universität Berlin and Buenos Aires University
            Article
            statecrime.10.1.0126
            10.13169/statecrime.10.1.0126
            f1f7c2de-82a4-4692-8f49-9ec5954ab386
            © 2021 International State Crime Initiative

            All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

            History
            Categories
            Custom metadata
            eng

            Criminology
            critical criminology,state-corporate crime,COVID-19 pandemic crisis,health care industry,pharmaceutical industry

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