ON THE CAUSES OF "WHITE-COLLAR" CRIME: AN ASSESSMENT OF HIRSCHI AND GOTTFREDSON'S CLAIMS

This article assesses Hirschi and Gottfredson claims about patterns and explanations of White-collar crime. It points out several flaws in their analysis and shows (1) that the UCR offense categories of fraud and forgery are not appropriate indicators of white-collar or occupational crime because the typical arrestee in these categories committed a nonoccupational crime; (2) that the demographic distribution (age, sex, race) of these "white-collar" crimes is not the same as it is for most ordinary crimes; and (3) that the occurrence of these "white-collar" crimes is not relatively rare. The implications of the findings for research and theory on crime are also discussed.     

CRIME AS HAZARD: PERCEPTIONS OF RISK AND SERIOUSNESS*

The study of crime suffers from an inattention to the social consequences of criminal acts. Conceiving crimes within the larger context of “hazard,” data are reported on the relative seriousness of conventional and white-collar crimes, as well as other hazards, using a sample of Washington state respondents. The results indicate that there is an inverse relationship between the perceived likelihood of a hazard and its seriousness. Generally, the more immediate the threat of a hazard, such as white-collar crimes, the more serious it is perceived to be. There are also implications from these consequences for perceptions of institutional effectiveness and interpersonal relationships. This suggests that future studies of the consequences of criminality, especially white-collar and corporate violations, might be directed toward the notions of risk and, eventually, social trust.     

CAUSES OF WHITE-COLLAR CRIME*

This paper begins with a conceptual analysis of the idea of white-collar crime. It considers data relevant to popular images of white-collar crime and outlines a general theory of crime explicitly applicable to both ordinary and white-collar crime. This theory is compared with traditional explanations of white-collar crime, and several explicit empirical tests of rival views are described.     

GENDER AND VARIETIES OF WHITE-COLLAR CRIME*

The Wheeler et al. (1982) data set of white-collar defendants is used to compare men's and women's socioeconomic profiles and occupations and the nature of their illegalities. The results show that a minority of men but only a handful of women fit the image of a highly placed white-collar offender. Most employed women were clerical workers, and most employed men were managers or administrators. Women were more likely to be nonwhite, less likely to have completed college, and owned less in economic assets. Men were more likely to work in crime groups and to use organizational resources in carrying out crimes, and their attempted economic gains were higher. Occupational marginality, not mobility, better explains the form of women's white-collar crime. The results raise questions about white-collar arrest data and the nature of crime and offenders in white-collar sentencing samples. They compel an investigation of the multiple injuences of gender, class, and race relations in generating varieties of white-collar crime and in being caught and prosecuted for white-collar crime.     

ORGANIZATIONAL OFFENDING AND NEOCLASSICAL CRIMINOLOGY: CHALLENGING THE REACH OF A GENERAL THEORY OF CRIME*

This article examines and critiques Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory of crime, with particular respect to its applicability to organizational offending. We question their views that the theory is adequately general and that typologies of crime are therefore unnecessary for criminological theory. Gottfredson and Hirschi have employed the case of white-collar crime to support their arguments, but they have con strained the test of their theory by focusing on the white-collar offenses that most resemble conventional crime. When organizational offending is included in white-collar crime, empirical and theoretical limitations of their project emerge. These limitations include the matters of defining and counting the phenomena of interest, the nature of the interest that commonly underlies them, and the role of opportunity in them. A satisfactory theory of organizational offending requires an adequate account of all these matters and will look substantially different from Gottfredson and Hirschi's theory of crime.     

THE NEGLECTED SITUATION: A CROSSNATIONAL STUDY OF THE SITUATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CRIME*

Although it is generally recognized in the social sciences that the “situation” is indispensable for understanding behavior, thus far criminologists have not devoted systematic attention to situational analysis. This paper contributes to the development of a situational perspective on crime by defining the concept of situation, developing four hypotheses about the situational characteristics of selected personal contact crimes, and then testing those hypotheses using victimization survey data from the United States and Venezuela. The research shows that coercive crimes are less situationally clustered than noncoercive crimes and that instrumental crimes are more situationally clustered than character crimes. Despite tremendous differences in crime rates for the two countries, substantial similarity is found in situational crime patterns. The implications of the research for criminological theory are discussed.     

Public support for punishing white-collar crime: Blaming the victim revisited?

It is commonly asserted that white-collar crime flourishes because the public is unaware of its costs and indifferent to its control. Survey data collected in Illinois indicate, however, that the public perceives white-collar offenses to have greater economic and moral costs than conventional street crimes, though not to be as violent. More notably, our sample displayed strong support for the criminal sanctioning of white-collar offenders. Public attitudes thus do not appear to be either a major obstacle to attacking upper-world criminality, or its source. It is suggested that attempts to blame the public for its immense victimization serve only to divert attention from the real structural conditions that underlie both high rates of white-collar crime and the reluctance of the state to bring the lawlessness of the advantaged within the reach of the criminal law.     

REPORTING CRIME TO THE POLICE, 1973–2005: A MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS OF LONG-TERM TRENDS IN THE NATIONAL CRIME SURVEY (NCS) AND NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY (NCVS)*

Although many efforts have been made during the past several decades to increase the reporting of crime to the police, we know little about the nature of long-term crime-reporting trends. Most research in this area has been limited to specific crime types (e.g., sexual assault), or it has not taken into account possible changes in the characteristics of incidents associated with police notification. In this article, we advance knowledge about long-term trends in the reporting of crime to the police by using data from the National Crime Survey (NCS) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and methods that take into account possible changes in the factors that affect reporting at the individual and incident level as well as changes in survey methodology. Using data from 1973 to 2005, our findings show that significant increases have occurred in the likelihood of police notification for sexual assault crimes as well as for other forms of assault and that these increases were observed for violence against women and violence against men, stranger and nonstranger violence, as well as crimes experienced by members of different racial and ethnic groups. The reporting of property victimization (i.e., motor vehicle theft, burglary, and larceny) also increased across time. Overall, observed increases in crime reporting account for about half of the divergence between the NCVS and the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) in the estimated magnitude of the 1990s crime decline—a result that highlights the need to corroborate findings about crime trends from multiple data sources.     

THE DYNAMICS OF CRIME REGIMES*

Crimes have many features, and the mix of those features can change over time and space. In this article, we introduce the concept of a crime regime to provide some theoretical leverage on collections of crime features and how the collections of features can change. Key tools include the use of principal components analysis to determine the dimensions of crime regimes, visualization methods to help reveal the role of time, summary statistics to quantify crime regime patterns, and permutation procedures to examine the role of chance. Our approach is used to analyze temporal and spatial crime patterns for the city of Los Angeles during an 8‐year period. We focus on the number of violent crimes over time and their potential lethality.     

Perception of Seriousness and Concern about White-Collar Crime: Some Results of an Opinion Survey Among Swiss Banks

Scientifically, little is known about white-collar crime in Switzerland or concern about white-collar crime and even less about how concerned bank employees are about this criminality. This article is based on a small opinion survey of Swiss bank employees and tries to explore perceptions of seriousness and concern about white-collar crime among people who, in their position, might have to face this issue regularly. Past assumptions on the public’s indifference towards white-collar crime seem not to be confirmed in this study as the results obtained demonstrate a greater sensitivity with respect to white-collar crime and especially towards crimes perpetrated by corporations. Even though Swiss bank employees do qualify white-collar offences as very serious acts, they are still more punitive with regard to ordinary crimes.     

CRIME DIVERSITY*

Large geographic areas should host a greater diversity of crime compared with small geographic areas. This proposition is reasonable given that larger geographic areas should not only support more crime but also contain a greater diversity of criminogenic settings. This article uses a neutral model to characterize crime richness as a function of area. The model starts with two neutral assumptions: 1) that all environments are statistically equivalent and exert no influence on what types of crimes occur there; and 2) that different crime types occur independently of one another. The model produces rigorous predictions for the mean and variance in crime richness with increasing area. Tests of the model against a sample of 172,055 crimes occurring in Los Angeles during the year 2013 are qualitatively consistent with neutral expectations. The model is made quantitatively consistent by constant scaling. Resampling experiments show that at most 20 percent of the mean crime richness is attributable to nonrandom clustering and assortment of crime types. A modified neutral model allowing for variation crime concentration is consistent with observed variance in crime richness. The results suggest that very general and largely neutral laws may be driving crime diversity in space.     

Violent Street Crime Versus Harmful White-Collar Crime: A Comparison of Perceived Seriousness and Punitiveness

Recent studies have challenged traditional wisdom regarding public apathy about white-collar crime by revealing equal or greater perceived seriousness of these offenses among respondents relative to traditional crime. Nevertheless, subjects in those studies were generally asked to contrast white-collar crime scenarios with a non-violent street crime baseline vignette. Perhaps a violent street crime would have invited lower perceived seriousness for the white-collar offenses. Participants in the present study were asked to (1) read vignettes describing violent street crimes and physically harmful white-collar crimes, (2) compare their seriousness, and (3) determine appropriate sanctions. Subjects perceived the violent crime scenarios presented to them to be more serious than the harmful white-collar crime vignettes. Further, they were less punitive toward white-collar offenders compared with street criminals. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Studying the correlates of fraud victimization and reporting

Little is known about the correlates of white-collar victimization, and even less is known about white-collar crime reporting. In this article, the extent to which predictors of fraud victimization are the same as the predictors of fraud reporting is examined. Using a national sample of fraud victims, these findings were consistent with prior research in that involvement in risky behaviors and age were found to be important predictors of fraud victimization. Additionally, the specific factors that are influential in predicting fraud victimization appear to vary across offense type. Unfortunately, little was revealed regarding the predictors of the official reporting of fraud victimizations. Future research needs to further unravel the importance of risky behavior in both victimization and reporting, as well as to focus on a broader array of white-collar crimes.     

Dissecting White-Collar Crime: Offense Type and Punitiveness

It is commonly asserted that the public is indifferent toward white-collar crime and hence is reluctant to “get tough” with more “respectable” criminals. However, such a contention fails to consider that there are many varieties of upperworld criminality and that the punitiveness of the public may differ markedly according to the type of offense involved. Based on a 1981 survey conducted in Galesburg, Illinois, we have attempted to investigate whether the criminal sanctions prescribed by citizens will vary when the broad category of white-collar crime is “dissected” into its component types. The data suggest that (1) there is considerable variation in punitiveness by type of offense; (2) while street crimes are generally given the harshest sentences, violent forms of white-collar illegality are accorded severe sanctions that exceed those meted out for some F.B.I, crimes; and (3) there is little support for the notion that the public responds leniently to upperworld crime.     

SPECIFIC DETERRENCE IN A SAMPLE OF OFFENDERS CONVICTED OF WHITE COLLAR CRIMES*

It is generally argued that white-collar criminals will be particularly influenced by punishment policies. White-collar crime is seen as a highly rational form of criminality, in which the risks and rewards are carefully evaluated by potential offenders, and white-collar criminals are assumed to have much more to lose through sanctions than more common law violators. In this article we examine the impact of sanctions on the criminal careers of 742 offenders convicted of white-collar crimes in seven US. district courts between fiscal years 1976 and 1978. Utilizing data on court-imposed sanctions originally compiled by Wheeler et al. (1988b), as well as information on subsequent criminal behavior provided by the Identification Bureau of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we assess the effect of imprisonment upon the oficial criminal records of people convicted of white-collar crimes. Comparing prison and no-prison groups that were matched in terms of factors that led to their receipt of a prison sanction, we find that prison does not have a specific deterrent impact upon the likelihood of rearrest over a 126-month follow-up period.     

White-collar and organized crimes: Questions of seriousness and policy

The line between organized crime and white-collar crime is often vague, compounding the separate social problems represented by these two types of criminality. This blurring is complicated further by the general assumption that organized criminals pose a more serious threat, thus requiring a stronger sanction than white-collar criminals. The controversy surrounding certain recent crime-control statutes centers around different assessments of the seriousness of both types of criminality. Prior studies of crime seriousness have focused primarily on crimes in general, with some attention to white-collar crime in contrast to ordinary crime. To date, however, no one has examined the differences in perceptions of seriousness between white-collar and organized crime. This paper investigates how occupation and attitudes toward the seriousness of white-collar and organized crime influence attitudes toward policy distinctions between the two, as well as toward the usefulness of various definitions of organized crime.     

FEAR OF CRIME IN RESIDENTIAL COMMUNITIES

Three variables were hypothesized to cause a fear of crime and a potential change in behavior. These were: (1) crimes against a person rather than crimes against property; (2) a crime committed in an area frequented rather than a crime occurring in an area one never entered; (3) a recurring crime rather than a crime that occurred once. Two different samples of female subjects (n = 249) were approached at their residences and were asked to read one of a number of fictitious crime stories that the news media supposedly had not reported and to complete two scales measuring: (1) an emotional response to crime and (2) a potential behavioral response to crime. The results indicate that a physical assault produces both more fear and more potential behavioral change than a burglary. A crime that occurs eight times causes people to consider taking precautions in comparison to a crime that occurs once. There is some evidence that a crime in an area one frequents causes more fear than a crime occurring in an area one never enters.     

White-collar delinquency

Seemingly harmless pranks by computer hackers have evolved into major economic crimes and acts of terrorism that appear far different than traditional forms of juvenile delinquency. Nonetheless, because they do not occupy the high status positions that facilitate white-collar crimes, serious computer crimes by juveniles have fallen between the theoretical cracks. A new hybrid category of crime that we label “white-collar delinquency” demonstrates that class does matter in the way illegal activity is conceptualized, and re-ignites debates regarding both white-collar crime and juvenile delinquency. We review conceptual issues that relate to this emergent form of computer-based deviance, and identify questions to be addressed in future theorizing and research. The authors wish to thank Gilbert Geis for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Disappearing act: The representation of corporate crime research in criminological literature

Following the labeling, conflict, and radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the attention these perspectives directed toward crimes committed by the powerful, it became commonplace for most criminologists to assume that corporate and white-collar crime received adequate attention in criminological and criminal justice literature. At the same time, corporate and white-collar crime researchers continued to assert that the behaviors they studied remain underrepresented in criminological literature, especially relative to the level of harm these behaviors cause. This article examines these two competing assumptions concerning the prevalence of corporate and white-collar crime literature during the later 1990s by: (1) analyzing the contents of several major criminological and criminal justice journals over a five-year time period; and (2) analyzing the coverage, placement, and integration of white-collar and corporate crime discussions in criminology and criminal justice textbooks. In addition, twenty-one Ph.D. granting criminology departments were polled to determine whether they offered regular and required courses on corporate and white-collar crime. Representativeness was determined through comparisons of the number of journal articles and the number of textbook pages published on white-collar and corporate crime indicators relative to the number of articles and pages published on several other criminological issues. Indicators of and the determination of representativeness are related to indicators of the seriousness (financial costs and level of violence) and impact of corporate and white-collar crime on society compared to the seriousness and impact of street crimes.     

SOME NEW EVIDENCE ON THE SERIOUSNESS OF CRIME*

Previous studies of the seriousness of crime have attempted to elicit information from public surveys. This paper reports on an alternative method of ranking the severity of crime. Actual victim injury rates are combined with jury awards in personal injury accident cases to estimate pain, suffering, and fear. Crime-related death rates are combined with estimates of the value of life to arrive at monetary values for the risk of death. These estimates are combined with out-of-pocket costs (such as medical costs and lost wages) to arrive at total dollar estimates of the cost of individual crimes to victims. These dollar estimates are then used to rank the seriousness of crimes. Although these two approaches yield surprisingly similar rankings, the monetary estimates indicate that violent crimes are relatively more costly to victims than survey results might imply.