State Crime in the Street-Level Bureaucracy

Abstract

On the basis of two points of departure: (1) no state has clean hands and (2) the types of crime a state commits vary with state formations, this article explores cases where the Swedish state and its agencies have been held responsible for some form of wrongdoing. Drawing on a total of 8,561 judgments issued against the state by agencies of control (the Parliamentary Ombudsman, the Chancellor of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights), the study finds that most cases of substantive and procedural crime committed by the state are related to the street-level bureaucracy, where state officials working in public sector agencies interact with citizens in the course of their everyday employment. Further, the study finds that most of the judgments revolve around issues of particular accountability relating to the individual interests of the complainants and that only a relatively small portion involve complaints against the state in relation to general policies or general conduct. One overall conclusion is that the crimes committed by the Swedish welfare state involve acts of negligence rather than purposeful acts of repression, and that the offences primarily involve procedural rather than substantive wrongs. The results are interpreted as a function of both how state bureaucracy works and of the limited ability of the existing control mechanisms.

Keywords

state crime welfare state street-level bureaucracy control of the state

Introduction

It can be found in all states, albeit some more than others and some more openly than others; no state has “clean hands.” (Williams, 2010, p. 742)

The above quote illustrates the article’s point of departure—that all states, even those with an international reputation for upholding human rights, commit crimes. State crime is defined here as either acts or instances of inaction which are attributable to an agent of the state and which violate domestic law (including administrative law) or international law, including human rights violations (Rothe, 2009). It includes, but is not limited to, acts committed by the state and acts for which state agencies are reprimanded, or deemed liable to pay compensation, by the mechanisms controlling the state.

Although there are no economic, ideological, or geographical boundaries to state crime, the types of crime a state commits vary according to state formation (Barak, 1991). In democratic states, human rights violations typically involve these rights becoming diminished or not being fully recognized, which differs somewhat from the situation in regimes where human rights are not recognized at all (Rothe, 2009).

When examining the issue of state crime, Michalowski (2010) argues that we should first ask the question: which state are we talking about? Sweden is one of the most encompassing welfare states in the world (Rothstein, Samanni, & Teorell, 2011)¹ and is for the most part widely regarded as a leading nation in the area of human rights (Silander, 2007).² In methodological terms, the country in focus could thus be regarded as an extreme case (Becker, 1998). Much of the most recent empirical work on state crime has focused on international crimes in general (Haveman & Smeulers, 2008; Jamison & McEnvoy, 2005), on the crimes of empires (Iadicola, 2010) or on gross human rights violations, such as those witnessed in certain regions of Africa, for example (Hagan & Rymond-Richmond, 2009; Mullins & Rothe, 2008), and in Iraq (Green & Ward, 2009; Kramer & Michalowski, 2005). These studies have thus primarily focused on crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide—which are often referred to as the worst of crimes. Consequently, by focusing on the Swedish state and on state crimes documented by formal control mechanisms, the article will instead examine other, less serious offenses for which the state and its representatives have been judged to be responsible. Prominent scholars of state crime have encouraged the analysis of all types of harm caused through the use of state power, including harms caused by bureaucrats in the developed world (Rothe et al., 2009). At the same time, it is worth noting that this article focuses primarily on the control of unlawful actions and instances of inaction committed by the state, and not on how many crimes are committed by the state or the forms taken by these crimes.

Other advanced democratic states, such as Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom have not escaped scrutiny. The extensive literature covers a range of case studies focused on state-corporate crime (including both state-initiated and state-facilitated crimes), corruption, illegal domestic surveillance, the use of excessive force by the military, the police and by prison guards, and other human rights violations (Barak, 1991; Grabosky, 1989; Michalowski & Kramer, 2006; Ross, 2000b, 2003). An important distinction should be made, however, between organizationally based actions, and individual actions conducted on the basis of motivations involving personal gain (Friedrichs, 2005; Ross, 2003; Rothe, 2009). Taking an organizational approach, this article aims to systematically explore registered incidents for which the Swedish state and its agencies have been judged to be responsible by the Parliamentary Ombudsman, the Chancellor of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights between 2000 and 2010. The study includes all the judgments in which these control bodies have either issued a reprimand or have resolved the complaint by ordering the Swedish state to pay compensation for damages caused. This systematic methodological approach is in contrast to the many case studies that have to date accounted for the majority of research conducted in this field (Rothe et al., 2009) since the variety of judgments examined here is not limited to the high-profile cases that have been examined in previous research. Instead, as will be shown, many of the incidents included here have occurred within the street-level bureaucracy of state agencies, where state officials interact with citizens in the course of their everyday work (Lipsky, 1980). Drawing on theories of bureaucracy and control, the specific aim is to examine what characterizes the crimes that a well-developed democratic state, such as Sweden, is held responsible for. Further analysis is aimed at establishing whether the type of crime committed by the state can be understood in terms of how the bureaucracy and/or the control of the state functions in practice.

The article adopts a broad approach in two senses. First, it highlights the most common rather than only the most high-profile cases, focusing on a wide range of wrongs and harms, including many less serious violations. In this sense, the inclusion of routine failures and nonsensational issues that have caused limited harm may represent a way of further developing our understanding of state crime (Vaughan, in press). Defining all the cases included in this broad spectrum of incidents as state crimes might seem unjustifiable or invalid, but this is not necessarily the case (Doig, 2011)—at least not when the term crime, as is the case in many other studies of state crime, is not used in its strictly juridical sense (Michalowski & Kramer, 2006; Ross, 2003). I will nonetheless be providing a further explanation of how the term state crime is used in this article. Second, by including all the judgments dealt with by the Parliamentary Ombudsman, the Chancellor of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights within a specific period of time, the study includes a variety of actors from the public sector. I will therefore also be providing a further explanation of the use of the term state. Thereafter, the article presents an overview of previous research and of the theoretical concepts that are relevant to an understanding of the crimes for which the Swedish state is held responsible.

Literature Review and Theoretical Approaches

The Concept of State Crime

Originally, Chambliss chose to describe state-organized crime as “acts defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in the pursuit of their job as representatives of the state” (1989, p. 184). Since then, scholars have been discussing whether or not the definition of state crime should include only what is officially defined as crime or should also include other harmful behaviors of the state (Matthews & Kauzlarich, 2007). The discussion has also focused on crimes committed at the intersection between the state and businesses, referred to as state-corporate crime (Michalowski & Kramer, 2006). Many criminologists studying white-collar crime, corporate crime, state-corporate crime, and state crime have accepted that we sometimes need to go beyond criminal law into regulatory violations and violations of international law (including human rights treaties) in order to be able to study powerful actors (Cohen, 2000; Michalowski, 2010; Michalowski & Kramer, 2006; Rothe, 2009). Thus, what we label as crimes and what we instead label as errors or deficiencies can be viewed from a constructionist perspective. As has been noted by others, laws are created through political processes and power struggles between different interests (Chambliss, 1975; Lynch, Michalowski, & Groves, 2006). This is true of both domestic legislation and internationally agreed conventions on human rights. Therefore, for the purpose of this analysis, acts for which the state and its agencies have been reprimanded or deemed liable to pay compensation by the Parliamentary Ombudsman, the Chancellor of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights are considered as forms of state crimes, even when these are not considered criminal law violations. The article employs a distinctly organizational perspective focused on the control of socially organized systems (Vaughan, 1999) such as the state and its agencies, and thus directs less focus at the individual actors who work within the state. This avoidance of an individual perspective is particularly important in the study of state crime (Michalowski, 2010).

It should be further noted that the state, as the term is used in this article, covers both central and local governments, and thus includes municipalities and county councils, which account for the majority of the public sector’s activities (Petersson, 2005). The growing privatization of state-owned companies may in this regard decrease the level of public sector activity and thus also the level of what is being controlled. In addition, the study includes incidents that might be labeled state-corporate crime, since the control mechanisms that are studied serve to monitor hybrids between state and business—municipal-, county- or state-run companies, foundations and associations, and private agencies with governmental commitments.

State Crime in Developed Democracies

The crimes committed by empowered states or full democracies have historically been engaged in by indirect or covert means (Rothe, 2009). These crimes include, but are not limited to, state-sponsored assassinations, state terrorism and coups, low-intensity warfare, torture, surveillance, violations of arms embargoes and renditions, as well as crimes enacted against other countries and their citizens (Barak, 1991; Rothe, 2009). Additional examples are provided in Grabosky’s (1989) study of state crime in Australia, which inter alia include: allegations of excessive force by the police and prison officers, gross waste and inefficiency in the expenditure of public funds, and environmental pollution. The crimes described by Grabosky as being committed within federal, state, and local governments include both institutionalized policy and conduct that was officially condemned. Grabosky concluded that for the most part, the harms that occurred were neither catastrophic nor trivial and were the result of negligence rather than malice. The victims in Grabosky’s study were in many cases drawn from the disadvantaged groups in Australian society, such as aboriginal people and defendants in criminal cases. Parallels can be drawn to a study of individuals who had been wrongly convicted (Westervelt & Cook, 2010), where society’s less privileged individuals were found to become the victims of state harm as a result of forced confessions obtained through violence, the fabrication of evidence, and also more diffuse forms of conduct such as neglect, cynicism, and stereotyping. In addition, Ross (2000b) draws attention to still other forms of state crimes that have been uncovered in advanced democracies, such as military violence, illegal police violence, illegal surveillance, corruption, and cover-ups. Whether these are the most common crimes in developed democracies cannot be established on the basis of these studies, but they provide a point of comparison for the state crimes revealed through an examination of the control of the Swedish state.

Control of the State

Control of the state has been explored in several books written or edited by Ross (1998, 2000a, 2000b), which for the most part focus on advanced democracies. The control mechanisms selected for this study can be categorized in different ways according to their function and purpose. The table below is built on Ross’s (1998, 2011) dichotomous concepts: formal/informal and internal/external (to a government or a country) along with some additions. The different types of control mechanism inevitably focus on different aspects of the state’s actions. The Parliamentary Ombudsman has the task of scrutinizing how Swedish laws are applied in the context of public sector activity, the Chancellor of Justice acts as the government’s ombudsman in relation to the supervision of agencies and state officials, and the European Court examines allegations of violations of the rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights (Danelius, 1998; Ekroth, 2001; Gullnäs, 2002). By comparison with the United States, for example, Sweden lacks a tradition of bringing civil suits against the state, and these control mechanisms constitute a way of seeking redress from the state. None of the control bodies are able to rescind decisions, and the available sanctions instead involve issuing reprimands/criticism and ordering the payment of compensation for damages. The Parliamentary Ombudsman and the Chancellor of Justice have the authority to prosecute individuals and also to recommend disciplinary measures—although this only happens a few times per year. Their main focus is directed at the organizations involved, in other words agencies or the state. This is one of the reasons that these control mechanisms were chosen for the study rather than, for example, prosecutions for misconduct or bribery in the national courts or disciplinary cases (involving dismissals, formal warnings, or salary deductions) dealt with by staff disciplinary boards. These can be viewed as means for the state to control its employees rather than as a control of the state.

Beginning at the top of Table 1, the three bodies examined are all formal control mechanisms in the sense that they have a formal obligation to control the state, in contrast to human rights organizations for example. Both the Parliamentary Ombudsman and the European Court are external to government in a way that cannot be said of the Chancellor of Justice. The external controls lie outside of the specific state apparatus and the control is imposed on the state (Ross & Rothe, 2008). In addition, since the Chancellor of Justice monitors the rights of the state and represents the state in legal matters, it is not a self-evident candidate for scrutiny of the state. Nevertheless, the Chancellor of Justice settles the level of damages due to individuals in the context of the improper exercise of public authority and also oversees more or less everybody who conducts public sector activity (Gullnäs, 2002). Internal controls have been criticized because they tend to protect the interests of the government rather than those of the individual (Ross, 2000a). As can be seen from the third row of the table, the European Court is the only control body that also is external to the country (international) while the other two are domestic. The last row in the table includes a further aspect of the control mechanisms examined, namely, whether they focus on controlling the state, its agencies, or state officials, that is, the structure or the individual. The criticisms expressed by the Parliamentary Ombudsman relate to public sector agencies, the Chancellor of Justice specifies damages against agencies, and the European Court of Human Rights in turn passes judgments on states. As has been noted, this study includes all the judgments in which these control mechanism have reprimanded the Swedish state or have required the state to pay compensation for damages between 2000 and 2010. These judgments account for only about 10% of the total number of filed complaints.

Table 1.

Types of Controls

Parliamentary Ombudsman	Chancellor of Justice	European Court of Human Rights
Formal	Formal	Formal
External (to government)	Internal (to government)	External (to government)
Domestic	Domestic	International
Controls agencies	Controls agencies	Controls states

There are several advantages to investigating crime in developed democracies, such as the fact that the survey materials are often available as a result of bureaucratic transparency (Ross, 1998, 2011). Even so, most of the state’s wrongdoings probably do not come to the attention of these three control mechanisms.

The State and the Street-Level Bureaucracy

Like several others, I find it reasonable to view the state as an independent and more or less coherent organization (Ahrne, 1998; Tilly, 1990).³ I argue for an understanding of the state as including more than the elected government, and as instead comprising the whole state apparatus including the public administration (Michalowski, 2010; Ross, 2003). Citizens’ contacts with the state are, as a result of their relationships with various agencies and organizations, often indirect and fragmented (Ahrne & Papakostas, 2002).⁴ Thus, the individual’s contacts with the state primarily occur via state officials. One particular kind of state official has been referred by Lipsky (1980) as the “street-level bureaucrat.” These officials interact with citizens in the course of their jobs and have discretion in exercising authority, although the limitations imposed by resources and conflicting and ambiguous goals entail significant constraints on their ability to meet demands on fair and effective treatment of citizens. Street-level bureaucrats have a considerable impact on people’s lives, for example, when determining the eligibility of citizens for benefits or sanctions. The relationship between the bureaucrat and the client is nonvoluntary in the sense that the citizen cannot normally obtain these services elsewhere. Lipsky (1980) concludes that public agencies whose clients are poor provide different treatment by comparison with those that serve more privileged individuals.

Lipsky (1980) points at the discretion exercised by street-level bureaucrats and argues that the decisions they make, and the routines they establish, become public policy. In a way, these bureaucrats are carrying out and establishing state actions and policies within the context of broader policy structures (Lipsky, 1980). Thus, much of the contact between the state and the citizen goes through the street-level bureaucrats, and the actions of the state then become visible through the work of these bureaucrats. This means that problems which affect citizens’ ability to obtain benefits and services from the state may easily be interpreted as problems associated with the street-level bureaucrats rather than as structural problems (Lipsky, 1980).

Data and Methodology

As has been noted, the aim of the article is to explore what characterizes the crimes that a well-developed democratic state such as Sweden is held responsible for. This is achieved by highlighting aspects such as the type of complainant, responsible state agency, the outcome of the control, and the type of judgment (whether it relates to procedural or substantive issues, negative or positive rights, general or particular accountability; see Appendix A for a list of variables).

The data examined comprise judgments that have been reported and have resulted either in a reprimand or in compensation for damages between the years 2000 and 2010, a total of 8,561 judgments. A majority of the judgments were issued by the Parliamentary Ombudsman (6,460) and the Chancellor of Justice (2,084) and all refer to incidents where state agencies have been adjudged to be liable.⁵ During the period examined, the European Court has only dealt with 17 cases that have resulted in a judgment specifying at least one violation. By comparison with other countries, the number of judgments from the European Court may be considered small, although there were quite a large number of countries that had even fewer judgments against them that specified violations. The relatively long time frame was chosen because some of the categories showed large year-on-year variations.⁶ Selecting judgments from the 2000s also enabled the analysis to focus on contemporary phenomena.

All of the judgments were merged into a single data set. The majority of the judgments were not read in full text because of the large number of cases involved. The registration data provided by the Parliamentary Ombudsman and the Chancellor of Justice included some information on each case, such as the name of complainant, the state agency against which the complaint had been lodged, the outcome of the complaint and a brief summary of the judgment. As is the case in many studies, the data were not produced for the purpose of the research (Becker, 1998), and an additional, complementary coding of the cases was therefore conducted. The coding process can be described as a basic content analysis, where “many words of the text are classified into much fewer content categories” (Weber, 1990, p. 12). The variable describing the complainant was divided into five different categories: individual, company, organization, initiatives/inspections (initiated by the control mechanism itself, and therefore no complainant), and other state agencies. The organizations category includes both economic and nonprofit organizations. The variable describing the state agency against which the complaint had been directed had to be simplified in order to make it comprehensible. For example, if a judgment stated that the complaint had been made against a police agency in a specific county it was categorized simply as “Police.” Some judgments concerned complaints against more than one state agency, and in these cases all the agencies were specified. The outcome of the control action was already coded in terms of either a reprimand or compensation for damages, and thus no further coding was required. Since some of the judgments involved more than one responsible agency, the data set was restructured so that each complaint referring to a specific agency was counted as a “case.” Thus judgments involving several agencies are counted as several “cases.” This explains why the total numbers of cases in the study (8,779) is greater than the original number of judgments collected from the three control mechanisms (8,561). A total of 42 of the original judgments were excluded, since the agency involved was not identifiable.

In addition to the three variables mentioned above (complainant, responsible state agency, and outcome of the complaint) three more variables were coded in relation to a sample of the cases (see Appendix A). On the basis of the judgment summary, each case was coded as either procedural or substantive, as involving positive or negative human rights violations, and as involving general or particular accountability.⁷ In contrast to the more manifest coding process described above, the coding of these variables required a latent content analysis (Weber, 1990). Since the coding of these three variables required giving more consideration to each judgment, only a sample of the cases was included. The sample was selected by generating a random sample of 25% of the judgments from the Parliamentary Ombudsman and the same proportion of those from the Chancellor of Justice, which involved the most common agencies (see Table 2).⁸ Since there were fewer European Court judgments, all of these were included in the sample. This sample comprised a total of 1,994 judgments.

Table 2.

Agencies of the Swedish State That Were Reprimanded or Required to Pay Damages Between the Years 2000 and 2010

Agencies	The Parliamentary Ombudsman	The Chancellor of Justice	Total amount	Percent
Municipalities	1,736	24	1,760	20
Prison and probation service	1,222	20	1,242	14
Police	751	453	1,204	14
Social insurance agency	737	267	1,004	11
Courts	403	231	634	7
Tax authority	208	408	616	7
Prosecution authority	306	70	376	4
County councils	223	4	227	3
County administrative boards	149	63	212	2
Enforcement service	101	58	159	2
Migration board	123	12	135	2
Government offices	37	87	124	1
National road administration	42	78	120	1
Other agencies	531	261	792	9
Nonagencies, Companies, foundations, and associations (municipal, county, or state-run) and private agencies with government commitments	121	36	157	2
Total	6,690	2,072	8,762	100

Note. N = 8,762. Missing = 17.

Procedural rules specify how tasks should be handled, and refers to accurate, objective, and professional processes. Substantive rules specify what is to be done and regulate what is permissible and appropriate conduct (Åström, 1988). For example, a judgment involving a procedural violation might relate to a trial not having taken place within a reasonable time or the poor management of issues relating to an individual’s right to benefits. A substantive violation, on the other hand, could take the form of an incorrect decision about the right to social security or the illegal surveillance of individuals.

The concept of negative human rights violations refers to individuals being subjected to unreasonable restrictions or control by the state; in other words, negative rights involve freedom from government interference. Positive rights are instead often expressed as the right to something, or what people should be guaranteed in order to live a humane and dignified life. Negative rights are associated with civil and political rights such as the freedoms of speech and expression, while positive rights are associated with economic, social and cultural rights, such as the rights to education and health (Namli, 2005). This classification can be compared with the differentiation that is made between state crimes of commission and crimes of omission (Barak, 1991; Kauzlarich, Mullins, & Matthews, 2003). However, the classification is a simplification and no rights can be considered as being exclusively positive or negative in all situations. In several of the cases in the data set, it was difficult to make a good assessment of the judgment summary in this particular regard, which resulted in more missing values on the procedural/substantive and positive/negative rights variables than was found for other variables. Nevertheless, the categorization was included in the analysis since it provides new dimensions for understanding the types of cases for which the state had been held responsible. Finally, the data set includes the variable distinguishing two types of accountability in relation to which the powerful can be held to account. Particular accountability refers to judgments where individuals or groups seek an explanation or redress on the basis of their own interests. General accountability instead refers to judgments where citizens seek to question or influence general policy or conduct (Mulgan, 2000).

Results

Criminogenic Bureaucracy

In the bureaucratic apparatus of the welfare state, the individual’s contacts with the state mostly take place at the street level (Ahrne & Papakostas, 2002; Lipsky, 1980). Table 2 identifies the most common agencies that have been deemed liable for harms by the Parliamentary Ombudsman and the Chancellor of Justice. Since the proceedings of the European Court acknowledge state accountability rather than the accountability of agencies, these judgments are not included in this analysis. Many agencies were found to be liable in only one or a small number of judgments, and thus in order to make the results comprehensible, I only present those agencies involved in 100 or more cases, with the remainder being categorized together as “other agencies”—a group that comprises a total of 92 agencies. In addition to these, the material includes actors which cannot be counted as agencies, but which nonetheless perform public services in various ways under the mandate of the state, a county or a municipality.

The agencies found at the top of the list are what Lipsky (1980) would call street-level bureaucracies, having a significant number of employees who have direct contact with citizens in proportion to the size of their workforce.⁹ This is in line with previous research in the United Kingdom, which found that those agencies identified as having the highest level of contact with citizens were also the most criminogenic (Ross, 2000b).

Several of the most prevalent agencies have contacts with citizens who belong to some of the more vulnerable groups in society, such as the Prison and Probation Service, the Social Insurance Agency, the Enforcement Service, and the Swedish Migration Board. Since a large proportion of the complaints against municipalities relate to the application of the Social Services Act, it would not appear unreasonable to assume that many of these judgments also relate to the members of vulnerable social groups. We could also include the Police, the courts, and the Prosecution Authority even though these agencies have more varied contacts with citizens. The individuals responsible for lodging the complaints may thus comprise inmates, crime suspects, asylum seekers, and people needing economic assistance or young or elderly persons in need of care. These are groups of individuals that can be compared with the victims found in Grabosky’s (1989) study, who were drawn from disadvantaged segments of society. Since their relations with the state are what Lipsky (1980) has labeled nonvoluntarily, these types of individuals are dependent on the state to have their rights observed. Groups of clients who are in great need of welfare services are also generally less able to defend their interests and demand their rights (Staaf & Zanderin, 2009).

The Complainants and the Outcome of Control

The vast majority of the judgments involve complaints by individual citizens. As can be seen from Table 3, the next largest proportion of judgments involved initiatives or inspections initiated for the most part by the Parliamentary Ombudsman but also by the Chancellor of Justice. Complaints made by companies comprise 4% of the total number of judgments, although they accounted for more than double this proportion of the complaints involving the Chancellor of Justice and The European Court. The difference noted between the different control bodies in this regard may relate to the possibility of receiving compensation for damages, which is not possible in cases dealt with by the Ombudsman. Seeing that an agency is reprimanded for its actions may provide more in terms of redress for an individual than it does for a company, which might explain why companies receive compensation for damages in the majority of judgments whereas judgments involving individuals instead more often result in a reprimand. This does not necessarily imply that companies receive compensation to a greater extent than individuals in similar cases, but rather that they pursue different types of cases, which result in different types of outcomes. In addition, the results show that all of the initiatives or inspections initiated by the Ombudsman and the Chancellor of Justice, resulted in reprimands and that none led to the award of compensation.

Table 3.

Types of Complainants, and the Outcomes of Their Complaints in Terms of Reprimands or Compensation for Damages, Percent

	Percentage of total	Percent reprimand	Percent compensation for damage
Individuals	86	78	22
Initiatives and inspections	9	100	0
Companies	4	34	66
Organizations	1	95	5
Other agency	1	42	58
Total	100	78	22

Note. N = 8,764. Missing = 15.

A small proportion of the judgments involve organizations that have lodged complaints against state actors. Most of these complaints come from inmate associations acting on behalf of prison inmates. Other organizations that are found repeatedly include housing associations, local labor unions, parent associations, and student unions. This is an interesting finding since it suggests that it might be easier to lodge a complaint against the state when there is an organization that can do it for you. A private individual has little power vis-à-vis a governmental department (Hurwitz, 1981). On the other hand, some of the organizations should probably not be seen as representing an individual but rather as looking out for the organization’s own interests. Another example of the individual not standing alone against the state is that even though it is not compulsory, many of the complainant-individuals have a lawyer registered as their representative. Almost all cases brought by organizations resulted in reprimands, and only a few led to the award of compensation for damages.

Differences regarding the outcome of the control process can also be noted across different agencies. The Government Office, the Tax authority, and the National Road Administration were more frequently required to pay compensation for damages than others. Even if the latter two may be considered street-level bureaucracies, they are not in close contact with citizens in the same way as the Prison and Probation Service, the Migration Board, municipalities and County councils, where the judgments for the most part resulted in reprimands. The conclusion that may be drawn is that human service agencies are not forced to pay damages to the same extent as others but are instead for the most part reprimanded for their conduct. One question that arises in this regard is whether the difference is associated with the agencies themselves or rather with the characteristics of the citizens who constitute their clients. Referring back to Lipsky’s (1980) arguments that public agencies with poor clients provide different treatment by comparison with those serving more affluent people, we might also expect complaints against these different types of agencies to lead to different outcomes. However, it is difficult to draw any firm conclusion on the basis of the data employed in this study, since the available information relating to each complainant was sparse.

Mainly a Question of Fulfilling the State’s Positive Duties and How It Is Done

As has already been established, the types of crime that a state commits will depend on the state and its formation. Conclusions relating to the characteristics of the judgments issued in Sweden can be generalized from the randomly chosen sample. Four types of categories of judgments can be identified: positive-procedural, negative-substantive, positive-substantive, and negative-procedural (see Table 4). A substantial majority of the judgments in the sample concern positive rights and procedural issues. In other words, the problems highlighted by the complaints relate to whether the state is fulfilling its obligations to provide support, or rather perhaps to how the state fulfills its positive duties. The outstanding feature of these judgments is the dominance of complaints lodged against municipalities and the Social Insurance Agency, working with different forms of social services. On the other hand, judgments relating to state agencies involved in the provision of public order and safety, such as the Prison and Probation Service and the Police, are also common. Almost all of the judgments relate to particular accountability and complaints made by private individuals. Typical judgments involve issues such as long processing times, trials not having taken place within a reasonable time frame, the poor management of various forms of benefits issues, incorrect entries made in public records, and delays in the provision of information or documents. In other words, the judgments are characterized by the welfare state’s failure to conduct its bureaucratic tasks properly. In the same way as with the cases in Grabosky’s (1989) study, the complaints that result in these seem to be a result of negligence rather than malice.

Table 4.

Type of Issues Covered by the Sample of Judgments, Percent of Total

	Positive rights (%)	Negative rights (%)
Procedural issues	69.4	7.4
Substantive issues	7.9	15.3

Note. N = 1,642. Missing = 352.

Some of the state crimes that come to the attention of the public are perceived as scandals or crises of legitimacy (Friedrichs, 2007; Ross & Rothe, 2008). I would expect that this was probably not the case with most of the complaints examined here since many of them seem to relate to relatively undramatic incidents. Nonetheless, many of the cases have undoubtedly had an impact on people’s lives. Even some of the issues that might seem trivial would, on the basis of Lipsky’s (1980) point of view, not be regarded merely as minor lapses on the part of state representatives, but rather as exemplifying the power that street-level bureaucracies exert over people’s lives.

In the bottom right cell of Table 4, the judgments concerning negative rights and substantive issues represent a smaller but not insignificant proportion of the judgments examined. The outstanding features of these judgments are the dominance of complaints against agencies that exercise control, that is, the Police and Prison and Prohibition Service. Even if the majority of the judgments involve complaints relating to particular issues, complaints that involve a focus on accountability for general policies or conduct still make up a considerable proportion of the judgments examined. In addition, other forms of complainants, such as companies, associations, and initiatives made by the control bodies themselves, are more common here than in the procedural-positive judgments. Typical cases include the illegal registration of individuals by the Security Service and the police’s misuse of pepper spray, seizure of property, improper searches, telephone tapping, and detention.¹⁰ The unacceptable treatment of prison inmates in the form of harassment, disciplinary punishments, and the use of isolation also appear frequently, as do judgments relating to Swedish regulations that are in conflict with European Union law. These judgments could be characterized as involving issues related to the state abusing its power. Several of the judgments appear to relate to incidents involving carelessness rather than intent, although the limited information available in relation to each judgment complicates such an assessment. Not infrequently, the main consequences described involve financial loss. However, there are a number of judgments that have involved severe personal injury. One example is the case of two asylum seekers who were deported to Egypt from Sweden by U.S. agents with the assistance of the Swedish Security Service. The two men were tortured while in custody in Egypt and the deportation itself, as well as the way in which it was performed, was subsequently criticized by the United Nations and several human rights organizations. The Parliamentary Ombudsman, which also dealt with the case, condemned the Swedish Security Service for their actions. The European Court judgments include several that relate to a planned but as yet unexecuted deportation in conflict with the European Convention on Human rights.

The other two categories in Table 4 comprise a combination of the two described above. The procedural errors relating to negative violations include a large proportion of judgments relating to the Prison and Probation Service and a relatively large proportion of judgments based on complaints from associations and companies or initiated by the enforcement authorities themselves. Typical judgments focus on problems relating to the examination of inmates’ letters, the improper management of various negative restrictions on individuals, for example, in the form of juvenile detention, arrest, and the compulsory auctioning of property. Other typical matters concern how people have been interrogated, detained, and body searched (when the basis for the decision was valid). The judgments that involve the state not having met its obligations as a result of having made or engaged in incorrect decisions or actions (positive-substantive) are more evenly distributed among the different agencies, although the Prison and Probation Service, the Social Insurance Agency, and the municipalities account for a larger proportion of the judgments than the others. Typical judgments focus on not having been given an oral hearing, wrongful decisions to release public documents, and wrongful decisions about the right to social security, while judgments relating to the withdrawal of rights or intolerable conditions in detention centers/prisons are also common.

By comparison with previous research on state crime in developed democracies, there seem to be both similarities and differences. A number of similarities with Grabosky’s (1989) case study in Australia have already been noted. Some types of judgments, particularly those in the negative-substantive category, are similar to those found in other advanced democracies (Ross, 2000b). The illegal surveillance conducted in Sweden by the Security Service constitutes the clearest example. Cases of illegal police violence and corruption were found in the data, but these do not dominate the picture. At the same time, the judgments from the Parliamentary Ombudsman, the Chancellor of Justice, and the European Court did not include cases of military violence, at least not in a way that could be seen from the judgment summaries. State crimes by indirect and covert means and crimes committed against other countries and their citizens were not found to any significant extent in the data employed in this study. Even if such crimes do occur, however, they would not be subject to the control of the control bodies examined here, given the nature of incidents involved and the limits of these controls. Making comparisons with other case studies might not be strictly appropriate, since the cases most often chosen are scandals that receive considerable public attention, and that are thus not the most common types of case. In this article, by contrast, the methodological approach employed means that the principal focus is directed at the daily contacts that occur between citizens and the state. By including different types of illegal state actions and by looking at the state as a broad organization, stretching all the way from the government to the street-level bureaucracy, the study has captured a picture that would otherwise not have emerged. Thus, the differences between the findings of this study and those of analyses from other comparable countries may not be related to differences in the behavior of the states concerned, but may rather be directly attributable to the composition of the cases included in the different studies. Having made this point, the scope of the cases examined here and the central patterns that have emerged can be further elaborated upon by reference to two possible explanations. The first explanation addresses the nature of the bureaucratic state, while the second focuses on the controls directed at the state. These explanations are not mutually exclusive but rather interact with one another.

The Welfare Bureaucracy and the Limitations of Controls

In the developed welfare state, the contact between the state and its citizens in many cases goes via social service agencies. These agencies provide public goods and supply services. In order to cope with various constraints, the street-level bureaucracy has developed routines and ways of simplifying both its work and its relations with clients (Lipsky, 1980). Lipsky (1980) argues that in order for workers to cope with the difficulties and ambiguities of their jobs, both the decisions and the processes that surround the making of these decisions become compromised. The dominance of positive-procedural judgments may in this sense be a manifestation of these coping mechanisms. In other words, the ways in which the work is being conducted in relation to the clients is being compromised by state agencies. Since state actions often become visible in the work of the street-level bureaucrats, it is not difficult to see why most of the complaints people make with regard to the state relate to issues of particular accountability. Only 5% of the total number of judgments included in this study was concerned with general policies or conducts. Lipsky (1980) argues that when parents are not satisfied with the education provided, they will first and foremost complain about the teacher, rather than focusing their complaints on the authorities responsible for many of the conditions in school. In the same way, many of the problems experienced by the complainants in the current study might actually be due to more structural and complex issues.

The study’s finding that the majority of the complaints comprised issues of particular accountability and judgments focused on procedural and positive issues, and the character of the judgments in general, might also be a function of how the control of the state works. Given that many complaints relate to state agencies that have close contacts with citizens drawn from the more underprivileged groups in society, such as inmates and people in need of economic assistance, one conclusion might be that it is possible for anyone to hold the state accountable, regardless of their position in society. On the other hand, there may well be groups of people, for example undocumented migrants, who can be considered even less privileged but do not, as a result of their situation, have any or only limited contacts with state agencies. Furthermore, knowing about one’s rights and about the opportunities that exist to seek redress may be regarded as a prerequisite for a functioning control of the state. Certain groups in society, such as asylum seekers and those arriving in the country with no identity documents, will find it more difficult to make use of the formal control mechanisms as a result of a lack of knowledge as to how the system works. For a criminologist, all of this gives rise to questions about dark figures and selection processes—what is it that determines who receives redress in relation to the state? Does this group constitute a representative sample of those who are the subject of state errors or crimes? The answer is probably not. Other researchers have noted, for example, that more privileged individuals have a greater chance of having their cases heard by the European Court of Human Rights (Dembour, 2006). Thus, the data sources employed in this study have certain limitations that may have affected the cases identified. An analysis of the criticisms directed at various countries in the reports from various U.N. commissions (monitoring mechanisms) or the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights would undoubtedly point to problematic areas such as the asylum process and the discrimination of indigenous populations and minorities rather than to single cases at the individual level. Further, if reports from various human rights organizations (e.g., Human Rights Watch reports and Amnesty International’s annual reports) were taken into account, these would probably identify issues other than those that have been examined here.

Even though the three formal control mechanisms are similar in some respects, there are some differences both regarding their character and the type of cases they produce. The picture painted above of mainly procedural-positive judgments associated with particular accountability is even clearer if we restrict the focus to the cases dealt with by the Parliamentary Ombudsman. Both the Chancellor of Justice and the European Court instead deal with a higher than average number of cases involving substantial and negative issues and also of cases involving general accountability. On the basis of the division into internal and external control organs described earlier, no clear pattern emerges. While the Chancellor of Justice may be considered a body of internal control, the Parliamentary Ombudsman and European Court may both be considered external. The latter is also external to country, whereas the other two are domestic. The judgments from the European Court are very few, however, and it is difficult to draw reliable conclusions on the basis of such a small sample. Given that internal control organs have been criticized for primarily protecting the interests of the government (Ross, 2000a), what are we then to make of the fact that the organ of internal control included in the current study appears to be more focused than the external control bodies on cases involving issues of general accountability, substantive issues, and cases relating to Swedish agencies’ violations of negative rights? There is nothing to say that these necessarily involve more serious issues. However, looking at the typical judgments found in the different categories, the negative-substantial cases such as the illegal surveillance of individuals may be regarded as involving a greater crisis of legitimacy for the state than, for example, the long processing times found in the category of positive-procedural judgments. The judgments involving issues of general accountability may also be seen as involving systematic problems to a greater extent. On the other hand, even if we accept this, it is not certain that the internal control actually appears to constitute a crisis for the state and its principal representative, the government, but may instead primarily constitute a crisis for the agencies. And I would in fact argue that the internal controls do not constitute a crisis for the state, but rather the opposite. When internal control mechanisms are tough on agencies, this may serve not to portray the government in a bad light, but may in fact rather serve to strengthen its legitimacy (see Hurwitz, 1981). As long as it does not engage in a systematic overview of crimes committed by the state, the internal control in particular, but also formal control in general, when it focuses on particular issues concerning single individuals, may be serving to strengthen the legitimacy of the state. At most, these controls reveal failings at individual state agencies or on individual issues. However, even if the control mechanisms function as a way of legitimizing the state, they may still provide an important form of redress for the individual. In this sense, the range of judgments included in this study could also be understood as constituting examples of the welfare state’s cooperation in the process of protecting the citizen from the state’s own failings.

Concluding Discussion

The judgments from the Parliamentary Ombudsman, the Chancellor of Justice and the European Court demonstrate the many faces of the state. Highlighting the most common, rather than only the most high-profile, cases produces a focus on a greater diversity of state actions. Much of what has been captured here involves events that occur in the course of day-to-day activities, with many cases appearing to be of a routine nature. The main issues concern how the state fulfills its positive obligations, that is, what are often labeled crimes of omission. At the same time, there have also been glimpses of the repressive state, but not to the same extent.

In conclusion, three assumptions about the state, the bureaucracy, and the control of the state, may be reinforced by these results. First, the overall assessment of the judgments clarifies the way in which the relationship between the state and the individual is mediated via the street-level bureaucracy. The fact that the judgments relate primarily to particular-procedural issues concerning positive rights serves to highlight the work of the bureaucracy in the welfare state. The dominance of judgments from agencies that are in close contact with citizens may be interpreted as being a function of the role and limitations of the street-level bureaucracy. Second, the limitations present in the bureaucratic organization produce a pressure on state officials to take shortcuts and to demonstrate their power in a way that affects citizens’ rights to welfare and fair treatment. Third, the control mechanisms function as a means of redress for individuals, but understanding the potentials and limitations of these controls is crucial to an understanding of the results. These specific controls produce certain types of cases, as a result both of their own specific remits and limitations and of individuals’ abilities to invoke accountability. Therefore, the types of judgments that have been revealed by this study are both a function of the highly developed welfare state and of the control organs being examined. This last conclusion opens up for a final comment on further research. The study of other forms of control mechanisms—formal and informal, domestic and international, internal and external—may provide a complementary picture both by identifying more structural problems and by exemplifying the crimes suffered by people who are unable or unwilling to make their case to the mechanisms examined here. Understanding how accountability and different controls are used in practice is key to a better understand of the crimes committed by states.

Footnotes

Appendix A

List of variables
Complainant
Individual
Company
Organization
Initiatives/inspections
Other state agencies
Outcome of the control
Reprimand
Compensation for damages
Responsible state agency
Type of issue (from a sample of judgments)
Procedural
Substantive
Type of right (from a sample of judgments)
Negative
Positive
Accountability (from a sample of judgments)
General
Particular

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dawn Rothe and Victoria Collins at Old Dominion University, whose assistance has improved the article significantly. The author is also grateful for the valuable comments provided by the anonymous reviewers.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed that the study was funded by the Department of Criminology, Stockholm University.

Notes

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