The Seriousness of Crime Revisited: Have Attitudes Toward White-Collar Crime Changed?

Social commentators have often observed that the public is indifferent to white-collar criminality. However, the growing attention that white-collar crime has received in recent years raises the possibility of changes in the public's perceptions of such violations. By replicating Rossi et al.'s survey in 1972 of the seriousness of 140 offenses, the present research presents data indicating that white-collar crime has increased in seriousness more than any other offense category, but that it is still viewed as less serious than most other forms of illegality. When different types of white-collar crime were analyzed, we found considerable variation in ratings, with high a degree of seriousness attributed to offenses involving physical harm. Further, while all categories of white-collar criminality increased in seriousness, attitudinal changes have been particularly apparent toward two types, Violent and Corporate Price-Fixing.     

DETERRENCE AND DETERRABILITY*

The first forays into Western criminological theory came in the language of deterrence (Beccaria, 1963 [1764]). The paradigm itself is simple and straightforward, offering an explanation for crime that doubles as a solution (Pratt et al., 2006). Crime occurs when the expected rewards outweigh the anticipated risks, so increasing the risks, at least theoretically, will prevent most crimes in most circumstances. If deterrence describes the perceptual process by which would-be offenders calculate risks and rewards prior to offending, then deterrability refers to the offender's capacity and/or willingness to perform this calculation. The distinction between deterrence and deterrability is critical to understanding criminality from a utilitarian perspective. However, by attempting to answer “big picture” questions about the likelihood of offending relative to sanction threats, precious little scholarship has attended to the situated meaning of deterrability. This article draws attention to this lacuna in hopes of sensitizing criminology to an area of inquiry that, at present, remains only loosely developed.     

Dissent,Public Space and the Politics of Citizenship: Riots and the ‘Outside Agitator’

This paper presents an historical examination of a significant period in which state authority and citizenship came together around the question of dissent in the US. Drawing on congressional records, news accounts and legal documents—and deploying theories of citizenship and space—it presents an argument about how state power and geographical space came together around the question of the ‘race riots’ that swept American cities in the late 1960s. I focus in particular on how government officials and others constituted the figure of the ‘outside agitator’ as the cause of illegitimate dissent and the subject of state intervention. Such arguments about the geography of authority and dissent were themselves interventions in the politics of citizenship. More broadly, then, the paper argues for closer attention to issues of difference—and the geography of difference—in the constitution of state power.     

The Advent of Space Weapons

Constellations of observation satellites resemble the “Panopticon” system imagined by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in his 18th century project for an ideal jailhouse — a system that Michel Foucault analyzed in Discipline and Punish (1975). Just as the warden in the central tower watches the prisoners without their being able to see him, satellites watch the Earth while observed countries cannot escape or monitor the extent of the observation.

Will observed countries factor in the control exerted by observing countries, just as prisoners will eventually interiorize the warden's discipline? This may indeed have been the goal of the U.S. satellite observation policy during the Cold War (1950's–1980's). The U.S. at the time sought to exert a new form of power on the international scene, resorting to persuasion and deterrence rather than all-out aggression.

U.S. satellite surveillance was at work vis-a-vis the USSR through different policies linked to nuclear deterrence; and vis-a-vis U.S. Allies (NATO, Great-Britain, France and Israel), then subject to a U.S. information monopoly. The intended panoptical power was not totally efficient, however. Regarding the USSR, its exercise depended ultimately on the political climate between the two Superpowers. Allied countries succeeded repeatedly in warding off U.S. attempts at control through information.