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

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.