White-collar criminals in Norway: An empirical study

This article addresses the following research question: What characteristics concerning white-collar criminals can be found based on newspaper articles in Norway? This research is important, as studies of white-collar criminals so far have focused on case studies rather than statistical analysis of a larger sample. Based on articles in Norwegian financial newspapers in 2010/2011, a total of 49 white-collar criminals convicted to jail sentence were identified. The average age of the convicted persons was 51 years. 47 out of 49 criminals were men. The average sentence was 3 years imprisonment. The average sum of money involved in the financial crime was 185 million Norwegian kroner (30 million US dollars).     

白领犯罪人矫正对策研究

近年来随着我国改革开放深入与发展,市场经济体制的建立,“白领犯罪日益增多,给社会造成了较大的危害。我国对白领犯罪的研究不多,学术成果更是寥寥无几,不适应社会现实需要。本文采取实证研究方法,以上海市宝山监狱为典型,对宝山监狱内“白领犯罪人”的基本情况、心理、狱内表现等进行调查、分析,以管窥我国整体“白领犯罪人”的特性,采取有针对性和有效的矫正对策,意图对白领犯罪人的回归社会起到积极作用。     

Gangs and delinquency

This study explores the meaning of police estimates of gang membership, by reviewing the characteristics of youth labeled as gang members in one western state, Hawaii, during 1991. Arrest patterns of these youth do not support the notion that they constitute a seriously violent subset of criminals. Indeed, nearly a third had not been arrested in the previous three years; notable too is the absence of a large number of weapon or drug arrests. These findings are amplified by data from a comparison of youth who were not labeled as gang members; these indicate that youth (in the City and County of Honolulu) who are delinquent differ little from those youth suspected of gang membership in terms of the frequency or severity of their offenses. Finally, the groups most commonly labeled by police as gang members are Filipino and Samoan males, but self-report data on gang membership indicate a somewhat different ethnic composition. The policy implications of these findings are also discussed.A previous version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, November 1992, New Orleans, Louisiana     

Similarities and differences between perceptions of peer delinquency,peer self-reported delinquency,and respondent delinquency: An analysis of friendship dyads

Purpose

Despite the peer delinquency measurement debate having profound implications for research, looming questions remain about the validity of various forms of peer delinquency operationalizations. This study examines whether perceptions of peer delinquency form identical latent constructs to both respondent and peer self-reported delinquency.

Methods

Using a dyadic dataset of friendship pairs, confirmatory factor analysis and model comparison tests are used to determine the degree of similarity between perceptions of peer delinquency, respondent self-reported delinquency, and peer self-reported delinquency.

Results

Peer self-reports and respondent perceptions of peer delinquency load on unique constructs across a number of different behaviors. For most behaviors, respondent perceptions of peer delinquency and respondent self-reports load on separate constructs. Results further indicate that respondent and peer self-reported delinquency are separate latent constructs. Finally, the strength of the association between respondent and peer delinquency is substantively smaller in magnitude, by as much as a factor of three in some instances, when peer delinquency is measured via peer self-reports in place of respondent perceptions.

Conclusions

Reports of peer delinquency provided directly from peers demonstrate strong discriminant validity in relation to self-reported delinquency, while perceptions of peer delinquency demonstrate poorer discriminant validity, particularly for theft and violence constructs.     

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.     

White-collar offenders and the jail experience: a comparative analysis

The incarceration experiences of white-collar offenders have received relatively little attention among criminological researchers, and the research that has been conducted has focused on offenders’ experiences in prisons rather than jails. The purpose of this study was to fill this gap by examining approximately 6500 inmates incarcerated in local jails, comparing those classified as white-collar offenders to violent and other non-violent offenders. The differences between offender types based on demographics, psychological adjustment (i.e., mental health issues since arrival to jail), and behavioral adjustment (i.e., institutional misconduct) are examined to see whether white-collar inmates have more difficulty than others adjusting to the jail environment (consistent with the special sensitivity hypothesis). Findings suggest that white-collar jail inmates do not appear to experience symptoms indicative of poor psychological or behavioral adjustment to the jail environment. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.     

Family, welfare, and delinquency

Data from a five-wave panel probability sample of families in the State of Washington were analyzed to test the hypothesis that female headship and welfare experience increased participation in and frequency of juvenile delinquency. Appropriate statistical models of random effect probit and negative binomial were employed. Results indicated that there were no direct effects of female headship and welfare experience on either prevalence or frequency of juvenile delinquency. Instead, it was found that the number of adult presence in a household and the child's school attachment significantly reduced the probability of delinquency and the tendency of being referred again in court.     

A latent structure analysis of delinquency

This paper uses latent structure analysis to develop a construct of delinquency based on a set of frequently used indicators of illegal behavior. Other methods, such as Guttman scaling and factor analytic procedures, are briefly reviewed as similar attempts to identify manifest (observed) variables that may act as indicators of a latent (unobserved or unobservable) variable, delinquency. The basic mathematical properties of the latent structure model employed in this paper are presented and then applied to a set of six self-report measures. The issue of external validity is also examined in a comparative analysis of an additive scale of delinquency and the latent class measure of delinquency. The latent class measure provides a considerable increase in the magnitude of association with such commonly studied correlates as attachment, peer delinquency, and instrumental attitudes toward the law.     

青少年犯罪原因解析及其预防

青少年犯罪是中国乃至世界所关注的一个社会问题,因为它不仅关乎一个社会的稳定与安宁,更关系到一个国家的未来。现阶段,青少年犯罪还处于上升趋势,并且还呈现出新的特点．我们必须在分析现阶段青少年犯罪原因和特点的基础上提出针对性的措施,建立有效的青少年犯罪的防控机制,来预防和控制青少年犯罪现象的发生。     

Negativistic delinquency revisited a behavioral analysis

A generalized revision of Albert Cohen's theory of negativistic delinquency is presented. The antecedent conditions of that theory have been broadened to include all contradictions between ideals and the practices that might, but do not, carry them out. Anger produced by distributive injustice has replaced reaction-formation as a causal mechanism. As revised, the theory appears to explain a wider range of “ornery” activities, some of which were negative cases for the original Cohen theory.     

Ivy league delinquency: A self-report analysis

Since the 1940s, self-report technology has been utilized to improve our understanding of the frequency and distribution of crime and delinquency. Findings based upon self-reports have called into question the traditional class-based view of criminality. It is now apparent that middle- and upper-class young people are involved in delinquent activity, although the precise extent and nature of such involvement remains unclear. The research detailed in this report attempts to add to our understanding of class and illegal activities by examining a sample of Ivy League undergraduates for evidence of participation in serious forms of delinquency. It can be argued that such a sample is especially interesting both because these respondents represent the “best and the brightest,” and because they possess relatively advantaged positions regarding access to conventional kinds of power and success. The findings indicate that serious delinquency is by no means rare among these youth. Involvement in violence, however, appears to be relatively infrequent and weighted toward the less serious end of the continuum of violent delinquency. In addition, the delinquent activity of this sample was highly diverse. Even for the most serious offenders the results provide little evidence of offense specialization.     

Incarceration, education and transition from delinquency

Purpose

Much of what is known regarding the transition away from crime is limited to young adulthood and specific life events and samples of non-serious offenders comprised mainly of white males.

Methods

The current study assesses the potential links between educational achievement, post-release schooling, and re-arrest for a cohort of 4,147 incarcerated youths drawn from 115 Florida juvenile institutions and followed for two years post-release.

Results

Incarcerated youths with higher levels of educational achievement are more likely to return to school after release, and those youths who returned to and attended school regularly were less likely to be rearrested within 12 and 24 months. Moreover, among youths who were rearrested, those youth who attended school regularly following release were arrested for significantly less serious offenses compared to youths who did not attend school or attended less regularly.

Conclusions

The study concludes with discussion of the importance of educational achievement as an important turning point for juvenile offenders as they transition into young adulthood.     

White-collar crime and the justice department: The institutionalization of a concept

The sudden and unexpected incorporation of white-collar crime as a top investigative priority of the U.S. Justice Department of the 1970s is the focus of this inquiry. This pursuit of white-collar crime is especially problematic for instrumentalist and structuralist variants of conflict theory, which generally view the origins of law in terms of the interests of a ruling or capitalist class. This apparent contradiction between official concern for white-collar crime and instrumentalist and structuralist theories of law creation is examined in the context of the discovery of white-collar crime by the Justice Department. It is noted that in the process of operationalizing white-collar crime, the Justice Department transformed the traditional (Sutherland) definition of white-collar crime so that targeted offenders are not limited to the economic and political elite, but instead are drawn from all social classes. This modification of the definition has far-reaching implications for assessing the nature of the Justice Department's response to the problem of elite crime and provides insight into the ongoing theoretical debate on the origins of law.     

School environment, self-esteem, and delinquency

The positive and negative effects of one's school environment (and interracial contact within this environment) have been widely debated. A question of great concern is whether the racial composition (e.g., school environment) of a school affects one's self-esteem. The present study explored whether self-esteem, race-esteem, school commitment, and delinquency differ by the racial composition of a school. Self-report questionnaires were administered to a random sample of 1,100 high school students in a large midwestern city of the United States. The findings (a) suggest that all four measures differ by school environment, and (b) provide partial support for earlier studies claiming that, within racially homogeneous school environments, African American students, in particular, enjoy higher self-esteem. Moreover, this finding might suggest that racial diversity within certain school environments (e.g., mostly Caucasian or equally mixed) carries with it lower levels of self-esteem. Higher rates of self-reported delinquency, however, were found in the equally mixed school environment than in racially homogeneous school environments.     

Alienation-reduction as a paradigm for delinquency reduction

It is suggested that agencies adopt the concept of alienation-reduction as the paradigm for designing and coordinating juvenile delinquency programs. Existing theory and data are consistent with the view that delinquency is associated with alienation and most existing rehabilitation approaches can be viewed within the framework of alienation-reduction. Adoption of the paradigm offers three important advantages: (1) it defines the problem in terms of the individual's relation to his environment; (2) it can facilitate communication among diverse youth-serving agencies; (3) it provides a logical basis for action and decisions regarding prevention, diversion, and treatment programs.     

The current state of gender-specific delinquency programming

Few attempts to identify “what works” in the crime prevention and offender rehabilitation research specifically address gender. The 1992 reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, however, called for new research that would improve the processing and treatment of delinquent girls. This article reviews the relevant theoretical and empirical research that both informed the new legislation and took place in response to it. This is followed by an empirical study conducted to: (1) identify gender-specific programs (GSPs), (2) determine the extent to which GSPs utilize applicable research in their design and implementation, and (3) assess the evidence of GSPs' impact on targeted outcomes. The findings from the current study suggested that, in addition to strengthening program evaluation methodology, gender-specific programs for girls need to more meaningfully incorporate relevant theories and gender-specific risk and protective factors into their curriculum.