Politics and white collar crime: Explaining government intervention in the Savings and Loan Scandal

The Savings and Loan Scandal of the 1980s was the biggest crime ever perpetrated in the United States. While several studies have examined the causes of the crime (e.g., deregulation, increase of insurance coverage to $100,000, fluctuations in the economic markets, greed), few scholars to date have studied state intervention in the industry after the crime had been committed. We explore the questions of when and how state managers intervene in the actions of the powerful by supplementing state theory with the literature on the social construction of social problems. Revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Miami, November 1994. The authors would like to thank the College of Criminal Justice of Sam Houston State University for financial support in searching newspaper data bases and Henry Pontell for comments on an earlier version of this paper.