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Understanding White-Collar Crime, Essay Example

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The term “white-collar crime” covers a broad area of behaviors and actions. In recent years, as headlines have been dominated by corporate and banking scandals, the notion of white-collar crime has received a significant amount of attention. Generally speaking, white-collar crime covers crimes committed by persons employed in non-labor, “blue collar” positions, and involve actions intended to achieve financial gains through illegal means. Not all white-collar crimes fall under the purview of criminal justice, however; some actions taken by white collar employees or their related companies might be considered actionable in civil, rather than criminal courts. For the purposes of this discussion, “white-collar crimes” will be understood to be crimes committed by upper-class individuals during the course of their occupation or employment. Understanding what motivates white-collar criminals has been a concern of psychologists and criminologists since the term was originally coined in the 1930s.

White-collar criminals typically differ in many respects from so-called “street criminals”(Braithewaite, 1985). They are more likely to be college educated, older white males who have not spent a lifetime as criminals (sagepub.com). These white-collar criminals often have certain personality traits, such as being extroverted and manipulative. White-collar crimes are sometimes committed by individuals alone, while others are committed by small or large groups of conspirators who find opportunities to profit illegally within the context of their employment. Because there are a variety of different types of white-collar criminals, it is difficult to say with certainty what drives this behavior.

A number of theories have been presented to explain the behavior of white-collar criminals, including Social Control Theory and Organizational Theory (Coleman, 1987). In the end, most of these theories fall short, as there is such a broad number of types of white-collar crimes and white-collar criminals. It seems that in most cases, white-collar crimes are crimes of opportunity; in that context, white-collar criminals have not been involved in a lifetime of crime, but instead find themselves in a position to take advantage of a particular situation in the course of their employment. It is this disparity between street criminals and white-collar criminals, and the disparity among the different types of white-collar criminals, which makes it so difficult to come up with an all-encompassing theory to explain the behavior.

Braithewaite, John. White Collar Crime. Annual Review of Psychology. Vol. 11. 1985.

Coleman, John William. Toward an Integrated Theory of White-Collar Crime. American Journal of Psychology. Vol. 93 No.2. September 1987.

Understanding White-Collar Crime: Definitions, Extent, and Consequences. Sagepub.com. http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/43839_2.pdf

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Life After White-Collar Crime

By Evan Osnos

In the nineties, Jeffrey D. Grant had a law firm in Westchester County, a seat on the local school board, and an ownership stake in a bistro called, if you’ll forgive the irony, the Good Life. He was in his early forties, garrulous and rotund, and he gloried in his capacity to consume. Each year, he took his wife and daughters on half a dozen “shopping vacations,” though they sometimes neglected to open the bags between trips.

Grant had developed an early appreciation for personal displays of wealth and power. Born in 1956, the son of a marketing executive, he grew up on Long Island, graduated from SUNY Brockport, and worked his way through New York Law School as a shoe salesman. By then, his parents had divorced, and his father had moved in with Lynda Dick, a wealthy widow whose properties included one of the most storied mansions in Greenwich , Connecticut, a hilltop estate known as Dunnellen Hall. (It later became famous as the home of Leona Helmsley , the hotel magnate convicted of tax evasion in 1989, after a trial in which a housekeeper testified that Helmsley had told her, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”)

Grant cultivated an ability to muscle his way into one opportunity after another. In law school, he approached the box office of a concert venue in Boston and, pretending to be the son of a music promoter, threatened revenge if he and three friends were not admitted free of charge. The brazen charade worked so well that the headliner, the rock-and-roll pioneer Gary U.S. Bonds, hosted the group backstage and, at the concert, sang “Happy Birthday” to one of Grant’s friends. As a lawyer, Grant specialized in real estate and corporate work and regarded himself as an “assassin.” In business and out of it, his philosophy was “Win, win, win.”

As he reached his mid-forties, however, Grant found himself unravelling. He had become addicted to painkillers—first Demerol, prescribed for a torn Achilles tendon, and then OxyContin. He was increasingly erratic and grandiose, betting wildly on dot-com stocks. In 2000, as his debts mounted, he started filching money from clients’ escrow accounts. The following year, after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Grant applied for a disaster-relief loan from the Small Business Administration, claiming to have lost the use of an office near Ground Zero. That was a fiction. He received two hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars, which he used to cover personal and office expenses.

In July, 2002, under investigation for breaching his clients’ accounts, he surrendered his law license and was later disbarred. That summer, as he sat in a Ralph Lauren wicker chair in his greenhouse in Rye, he attempted suicide, swallowing forty tablets of Demerol. He survived, and entered drug and alcohol rehab. He and his wife moved to Greenwich, seeking a fresh start, but the marriage was too badly frayed to survive.

Grant’s undoing was not yet complete: officers of the Internal Revenue Service discovered the false claim on his loan application, and in 2004 a warrant was issued for his arrest. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering, and a judge sentenced him to eighteen months in prison, chastising him for exploiting a national tragedy. On Easter Sunday, 2006, two friends drove Grant three hours west from Greenwich to Allenwood Low, a federal prison in the mountainous Amish country of central Pennsylvania. Grant quickly learned the rules: never take someone’s seat in the TV room or ask a stranger what landed him in prison. And he mastered the black-market economy that runs on “macks,” or foil packages of smoked mackerel, which sell for about a dollar in the commissary. He marked time mostly by walking—circling an outdoor track three or four hours a day, listening to NPR on headphones. “In the morning, all the airplanes from the East Coast would fly over going west, and at night they would come the other way,” he told me. “I would remember myself as a businessman.”

Grant was released to a halfway house in June, 2007, after fourteen months in prison. He had walked thirty-five hundred miles around the track and shed sixty-five pounds. He returned to Greenwich with no idea of what to do next.

Many people who have served time for white-collar felonies look to get back into business. Barely six months after the home-wares mogul Martha Stewart emerged from prison—she had been convicted of lying to investigators about a stock trade—she was hosting two new television shows. Grant, who no longer had a law license, tried applying himself to good works instead. He volunteered at rehab facilities that had helped him get sober. He joined the board of Family ReEntry, a nonprofit in Bridgeport, which aids formerly imprisoned people and their families, and he later served as its executive director. Hoping to improve his inner life, he studied for a divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary, in Manhattan. In 2009, he married Lynn Springer, a Greenwich event planner he had met in recovery. In 2012, they founded the Progressive Prison Project, a ministry focussed on white-collar and other nonviolent offenders.

As word of his experience spread, Grant started hearing from neighbors who were heading to prison or had recently returned and were seeking advice or companionship. At the time, a sense of alarm was animating conversations among businessmen along the Metro-North corridor: Preet Bharara , the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, had imposed a crackdown on insider trading, leading to more than eighty guilty pleas and convictions. Some of these cases were later invalidated by an appeals court, but Operation Perfect Hedge, as it was known, had punctured the realm of traders, analysts, and portfolio managers. “My phone would ring in the middle of the night,” Grant said. One financier, under indictment, called while hiding in his office with the lights out. “He said, ‘I’m afraid that people will recognize me on the street,’ ” Grant recalled. A reporter from Absolute Return , a trade publication for the hedge-fund industry, asked Grant, “How do Wall Street skills usually translate in prison?” His reply: “These skills are not only in large degree useless, they are probably counterproductive.” As he told me recently, “Business rewards a certain type of attitude and assertiveness—all things that will get you killed in prison.”

Grant, in his pastoral role for anxious brokers, fallen hedgies, and other wobbling pillars of late capitalism, came to expect fresh inquiries from desperate people each morning when he opened his e-mail. “Everyone going through this is freaking out, so they’re up all night, Googling,” he said. In the hope of nourishing his unlikely flock, Grant developed an ambitious reading list, which included “ Letters and Papers from Prison ,” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and “ The Gulag Archipelago ,” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. If some callers found that Bonhoeffer’s words of resistance to the victims of national socialism did not seem immediately applicable, Grant also offered practical tips. Before reporting to prison, he advised them, mail yourself the phone numbers of family members and friends on the visitors’ list, because “you’ll be too discombobulated to remember them once you’re inside.” And remind your wife never to touch paper money on the morning of a visit; almost every bill bears traces of drug residue, which will set off the scanners.

In 2016, Grant established what he called the White Collar Support Group, an online meeting inspired by twelve-step programs for drug and alcohol addiction. He described the program as a step toward “ethics rehab” and, on his Web site, explained that it was for people who wanted to “take responsibility for our actions and the wreckage we caused.” In blunter terms, he told me that it was for “guys detoxing from power and influence.”

The first session attracted four attendees, including a hedge-fund manager and a man who had pilfered from his child’s youth-soccer club. But soon the program grew. In the next five years, more than three hundred people cycled through, either on their way to prison or just out and trying to reëstablish a semblance of their old order. Some of Grant’s flock were familiar from front-page scandals, born of Ponzi schemes, insider trading, and other forms of expensive corruption; others were virtually unknown to the public. This summer, I asked him if I could sit in on a meeting of the White Collar Support Group. He agreed, but alerted his members in advance, in case anyone wanted to preserve his privacy.

At seven o’clock one evening in July, I signed on to Zoom and found myself with twenty-eight people, mostly male and white, each identified by a name and a location. Meetings are free, though Grant suggests a donation of five dollars to his ministry. He draws a distinction between his work and the industry of white-collar “prison coaches” who offer bespoke services for a price. Among them, Wall Street Prison Consultants promises to “ensure you serve the shortest sentence possible in the most favorable institution.” It sells consulting packages at the levels of Bronze, Silver, and Gold, the finest of which includes “Polygraph Manipulation Techniques,” “Prison Survival Orientation Coaching,” and an “Early Release Package” that helps clients apply for a drug-treatment program to reduce the length of a sentence.

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Grant, who now lives in Woodbury, Connecticut, appeared on camera wearing a pale-blue oxford shirt and sitting before a stone fireplace. As he called the meeting to order, we recited Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, and then Grant reminded everyone of the rules: with few exceptions, anyone who talked for more than three minutes would hear a snippet of music—on this occasion, the Parliament funk classic “Mothership Connection (Star Child)”—signalling him to wrap it up. Surrendering control, Grant likes to tell his charges, may not come naturally.

Before the meeting, Grant had warned me not to expect universal contrition. “Almost everyone who contacts us has been successful, controlling, and perhaps narcissistic,” he said. “The elements that made them successful are also the elements that contributed to their demise.” Throughout their pre-indictment careers, aggression and rule-bending were considered strengths. In American culture, white-collar crime is often portrayed less as evidence of unfettered greed than as a misguided sibling of success.

By and large, the country’s governing class has encouraged that view. After the stock market crashed in 1929, Congress faced public pressure to curb the backroom manipulation that had helped devastate millions of shareholders. But Richard Whitney, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, a graduate of Groton and Harvard, told senators in Washington, “You gentlemen are making a great mistake. The exchange is a perfect institution.” In 1938, Whitney was caught embezzling from the New York Yacht Club, his father-in-law, and a number of others. He went to Sing Sing dressed in a double-breasted suit.

Not long after Whitney’s fall, the sociologist Edwin Sutherland devised the term “white-collar crime,” to describe wrongdoing committed “by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.” Since then, each cycle of boom and bust has delivered new iterations of rapacious self-dealing, often indelibly linked to time or place, like schools of painting—the naked fraud of a Savings & Loan, the whimsical math of an Arthur Andersen. In 2001, following the accounting scandals at Enron and other companies, a publication called CFO Magazine quietly abandoned its annual Excellence Awards, because winners from each of the previous three years had gone to prison.

Since the turn of the millennium, the prosecution of white-collar crime has plummeted—but this should not imply a surge in moralism among our leading capitalists. After the attacks of September 11th, the F.B.I. began to shift resources toward counterterrorism. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers cut the budget of the Internal Revenue Service so sharply that it had the same number of special agents in 2017 as it had half a century earlier, even though the national population has grown by two-thirds.

The effects of impunity have become more blatant since the Great Recession of 2007-09, when, infamously, almost no top executives went to prison—despite the loss of more than nineteen trillion dollars in household wealth. At the time, leaders at the Department of Justice claimed that they could not prove fraudulent intent by Wall Street titans, who were many layers removed from the daily handling of toxic securities. Jed Rakoff, a judge in the Southern District of New York, believes that this was a catastrophic misreading of the law. Executives, he argues, could have been prosecuted under the principle that they were “willfully blind” to patterns of abuse that enriched them. “Dozens of people defrauded millions of people out of probably billions of dollars,” Rakoff told me. The imperatives had less to do with compensating victims than with deterring crimes not yet conceived. “There are studies that are more than a hundred years old that show that the best way to deter any crime is to catch the perpetrators quickly,” he said.

In the years since, the failure to hold top executives accountable has become intertwined with historic levels of income inequality, a phenomenon that Jennifer Taub, a professor at Western New England University School of Law, calls “criminogenic.” In her 2020 book, “Big Dirty Money,” she wrote, “In our society, extreme wealth often confers tremendous power. So just as power tends to corrupt, so does excessive wealth.” But nothing expressed America’s ambivalence toward white-collar crime more eloquently than the election of Donald J. Trump, whose life and career as a business fabulist merited no fewer than a hundred and twenty-five mentions in “ Big Dirty Money .” Under his leadership, federal prosecutions of white-collar crime reached an all-time low. In 2020, Trump delivered pardons and clemency to a slew of affluent felons, including Michael Milken, the junk-bond trader who had pleaded guilty to securities violations three decades earlier. Taub noted that the official White House announcement about the pardoned businessmen used the word “successful” to describe them four times.

Measurements of success, or something like it, haunt the conversations in the White Collar Support Group. In the Zoom meeting, one of the first people to speak up was Andy Tezna, a thirty-six-year-old former executive at NASA , who had been sentenced the previous week for fraud. Applying for COVID relief in the name of fictitious businesses, Tezna had collected more than three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, including loans issued under the Paycheck Protection Program. He used the money to finance a Disney Vacation Club time-share, a swimming pool ($48,962), and, to ease the social isolation of the pandemic, a French bulldog ($6,450).

“I got eighteen months,” Tezna told the group, glumly. “Definitely not the number I had in mind.” He was sitting beside a window covered by venetian blinds; he wore white earbuds and several days’ growth of beard. He was waiting for word on when to report to prison. In court, Tezna and his lawyer had presented him as an American success story gone wrong. His family had come from Colombia when he was thirteen and lived in an unfinished basement, while he helped his mother clean houses. Later, he earned a degree from George Mason University and landed a job at NASA, which paid him a hundred and eighty-one thousand dollars a year. In the job, he attended a space launch with members of Trump’s Cabinet and Elon Musk. “I just thought, My life is great,” he told the group.

To the judge, Tezna had framed his malfeasance narrowly, arguing, “I was bad at managing my finances.” The Justice Department thought it was worse than that. “These are not one-off mistakes,” a prosecutor told the court. “This was greed.”

A voice on the call piped up: “Hey, Andy? It’s Bill Baroni.”

It took me a moment to place the name. Then I remembered Bridgegate. In 2013, after the New Jersey governor Chris Christie appointed Baroni as the deputy executive director of the Port Authority, he was accused of helping to arrange a traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge, in order to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, who had refused to endorse Christie for reëlection. Baroni was convicted of fraud and served three months in prison. But he denied the charges, and eventually the Supreme Court overturned his conviction. Justice Elena Kagan wrote that, even though the evidence showed “deception, corruption, abuse of power,” the Bridgegate episode did not meet the legal threshold of fraud. Baroni’s victory in the Supreme Court gave him unique status in the group. “I got the exact same sentence you did—eighteen months,” he told Tezna. “I know what’s in your head today.”

For the next ninety minutes, the mood veered between grave and celebratory. Members swapped tidbits about mutual friends (“He got moved out of the private prison in Mississippi”) and applauded new ventures (“I signed a lease last week”). Grant has developed a soothing vocabulary—about strength regained and community embraced—which collided occasionally with members’ laments. “As a single guy, I can tell you dating sucks,” a man in Delaware said, “because the reactions from women run the gamut from ‘Oh, my God, you’re the worst form of life on earth’ to ‘Oh, that’s cool! Women like bad boys.’ ” A former hedge-fund manager in Chicago was still smarting over the publicity around his indictment. “Reporters were calling my parents and my brother,” he said. “I don’t even know how they got their phone numbers.” Members of the group arrive in disparate circumstances: some have managed to keep significant assets, while others are tapped out after restitution and legal expenses. According to Grant, the biggest distinction is between those who have been to prison and those who have not. Those who haven’t served time, he told me, are “sort of outside the club.”

More than a few members attributed their crimes to a kind of consumerist inadequacy. Craig Stanland, who defrauded the networking company Cisco of equipment worth more than eight hundred thousand dollars, told the group, “It was just pure shame from the beginning—not being able to tell my wife that I couldn’t afford that life style, all the way through getting arrested. And then the scarlet letter.” But Bill Livolsi, speaking from the Tulsa suburbs, who went to prison for his role in a Ponzi scheme that passed itself off as a hedge fund, had come to see his new circumstances as an unburdening. “I finally got a job after a year of being out. It makes a whopping fifteen dollars an hour, but I’ve never been happier with a job,” he said. “My focus isn’t on what flight I’m taking or where I’m going on this particular vacation. It’s on how my family’s doing and how I’m doing.”

Grant is solicitous. He asks new members to introduce themselves and, when needed, draws them out. Richard Bronson, a former Lehman Brothers stockbroker with cropped gray hair and a beard, said, “I used to work on Wall Street. I did very well.” In fact, Bronson became a partner at Stratton Oakmont, the firm made infamous by Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.” He moved to Florida and converted a small trading house called Biltmore Securities into a firm with five hundred employees. In Miami, he joined the boards of the ballet and the museum of contemporary art, opened a night club and started a magazine, and held court at an oceanside villa. But prosecutors said that all this was built on deceit; they accused him of running a boiler room that fed investors a stream of bogus stocks, causing losses estimated at ninety-six million dollars. Bronson disputed this figure, and insisted that he had repaid his clients. Nevertheless, he pleaded guilty to securities and wire fraud in 2002, and served twenty-two months in prison.

Bronson told the group, “This is really the first time I’ve ever been around people who have similar comeuppances.” He has been trying to revive his business career, launching 70 Million Jobs, a post-prison employment service, and an app called Commissary Club (“the exclusive social network for people with criminal histories”). “I’ve been out of prison for sixteen years, and I committed my crimes more than twenty-five years ago, and yet I wake up every morning with this gaping hole in my heart, out of regret for the things that I did.” He choked up momentarily and paused to collect himself. “I don’t suspect that I’ll get over this feeling,” he said, “and that saddens me.”

Others tried to buck him up. “I think we’re going to have to have a meeting about self-care soon,” Grant said.

Behind each new revelation of white-collar crime lurks an uncomfortable question about some of America’s most lucrative businesses: Are they attracting rogues or grooming them? Eugene Soltes, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me that regulations were partly to blame. “There is more white-collar crime today because there are more things that are criminal today than fifty years ago,” he said. Bribing a foreign official, for instance, was legal until the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, and insider trading was rarely prosecuted until the nineteen-eighties. Today, those are among the most common offenses. But, Soltes went on, “I suspect that you might be asking the more intuitive version of this question. Given the same laws, same number of people, et cetera, is the proclivity for someone to engage in white-collar crime higher than it was fifty years ago?”

For his book “ Why They Do It ,” Soltes interviewed scores of people convicted or accused of white-collar crime. He said that he had found no evidence of a growing inclination to break laws. What has changed, though, is what he calls the “psychological distance” between perpetrators and their victims: “Business is done with individuals at greater length now, which reduces the feeling that managers are harming others.” In thought experiments, people agree to sacrifice the life of someone they can’t see far more readily than that of someone who stands before them. In Soltes’s interviews with people who had committed price-fixing or fraud, he found that many of them had never had a personal encounter with the victims.

In recent years, the lament that moral constraints have weakened has been voiced not just by critics of Wall Street but also by practitioners. In 2012, John C. Bogle, an iconic investor who founded the Vanguard Group and spent more than six decades in finance, wrote, “When I came into this field, the standard seemed to be ‘there are some things that one simply doesn’t do.’ Today, the standard is ‘if everyone else is doing it, I can do it too.’ ” Soon afterward, the law firm Labaton Sucharow conducted a survey of finance professionals, in which a quarter of them said that they would “engage in insider trading to make $10 million if they could get away with it.” Around the same time, Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, announced his resignation, decrying a “decline in the firm’s moral fiber.” Writing in the Times , he observed, “Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ‘muppets.’ . . . You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about ‘muppets,’ ‘ripping eyeballs out’ and ‘getting paid’ doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.”

Researchers have elucidated the way that dubious behavior moves through a community. In the mid-aughts, the federal government brought criminal and civil cases for backdating stock options—manipulating records so that executives could take home a larger return than their options really delivered. Studies found that the practice had started in Silicon Valley and then infected the broader business world; the vectors of transmission could be traced to specific individuals who served as directors or auditors of multiple companies. An unethical habit spreads in encounters among neighbors and colleagues, through subtle cues that psychologists call “affective evaluations.” If people are rising on one measurement (profit) even as they are falling on another (ethics), the verdict about which matters more will hinge on the culture around them—on which values are most “exalted by members of their insular business communities,” Soltes observed in his book. As he told me, “If you spend time with people who pick locks, you will probably learn to pick locks.”

In 2013, prosecutors announced an indictment of S.A.C. Capital Advisors—named for its founder, Steven A. Cohen —calling it a “veritable magnet for market cheaters.” Cohen, like a considerable number of his peers, lived in Greenwich. In the previous decade, as the hedge-fund industry surged in scale and profits, the rise of the Internet had allowed funds to leave Wall Street, and many moved to southern Connecticut to take advantage of favorable tax rates and easy commutes. By 2005, hedge funds had taken over two-thirds of Greenwich’s commercial real estate.

After the charges against Cohen were announced, David Rafferty, a columnist for Greenwich Time , a local paper, published a piece with the headline “ Greenwich, Gateway to White-Collar Crime .” He wrote, “A few years ago you might have been proud to tell your friends you lived in ‘The Hedge Fund Capital of the World.’ Now? Not so much.”

Rafferty, in his column, described a “growing sense of unease in certain circles as one hedgie after another seems to be facing the music.” Cohen, however, faced the music for a limited interlude. Under an agreement brokered with prosecutors, his firm pleaded guilty to insider trading and was sentenced to pay $1.8 billion in penalties. After a two-year suspension, Cohen returned to the hedge-fund business, and made enough money to buy the New York Mets. The price was $2.4 billion, the largest sum ever paid for a North American sports franchise.

Luigi Zingales, a finance professor at the University of Chicago, told me that he wishes his profession spoke more candidly about accountability and impunity. Most of the time, he said, business schools find “every possible way to avoid the moral questions.” He added, “I don’t know of any alum that has been kicked out of the alumni association for immoral behavior. There are trustees of business schools today who have been convicted of bribery and insider trading, and I don’t think people notice or care.” He went on, “People are getting more and more comfortable in the gray area.”

One of the longest-running members of the White Collar Support Group is a lean and taciturn man in his forties named Tom Hardin—or, as he is known with some notoriety in Wall Street circles, Tipper X. Not long after graduating from business school at Wharton, Hardin went to work for a hedge fund in Greenwich. He had much to learn. Almost instantly, he began hearing that some competitors, such as the billionaire Raj Rajaratnam , were suspected of relying on illegal tips from company insiders. (Rajaratnam was later convicted and sentenced to eleven years.) In 2007, after Hardin became a partner at Lanexa Global Management, a hedge fund in New York, he got his own inside tip, a heads-up on an upcoming acquisition, and he traded on the information and beat the market. He repeated similar stunts three times. “I’m, like, I would never get caught if I buy a small amount of stock,” he told me. “This is like dropping a penny in the Grand Canyon.” He went on, “You can say, ‘I’m highly ethical and would never do this.’ But once you’re in the environment, and you feel like everybody else is doing it, and you feel you’re not hurting anybody? It’s very easy to convince yourself.”

One morning in 2008, Hardin was walking out of the dry cleaner’s when two F.B.I. agents approached him. They sat him down in a Wendy’s nearby and told him that they knew about his illegal trades. He had a choice: go to jail or wear a wire. He chose the latter, and became one of the most productive informants in the history of securities fraud. The F.B.I. gave him a tiny recorder disguised as a cell-phone battery, which he slipped into his shirt pocket, to gather evidence in more than twenty criminal cases brought under Operation Perfect Hedge. For a year and a half, his identity was disguised in court documents as Tipper X, fuelling a mystery around what the Times called “the secret witness at the center of the biggest insider-trading case in a generation.”

In December, 2009, Hardin pleaded guilty, and his identity was revealed in court filings. He had avoided prison but become a felon, which made features of a normal life all but impossible, from opening a brokerage account to coaching his daughters’ soccer team. He was unsure how he could earn a living. “I would ask my attorney, ‘Are there any past clients you can connect me with who’ve got to the other side of this and are back on their feet?’ He was, like, ‘Sorry, not really.’ ”

He heard of Grant’s group through a friend. “I had no idea something like this existed,” Hardin said. “Jeff was the first one who said, ‘Hey, here’s a group of people just in our situation. Come every Monday.’ ” In 2016, the F.B.I. called him again—this time, to invite him to brief a class of freshman federal agents. Hardin’s lecture at the F.B.I. led to more speeches—first for free, and eventually for a living. He was back on Wall Street, as a teller of cautionary tales. It was not quite motivational speaking; his niche, as he put it, dryly, was “overcoming self-inflicted career decimation.”

In his dealings with his peers, Hardin has learned to distinguish who is genuinely remorseful from who is not. “I’ll hear from white-collar felons who tell me, ‘I made a mistake,’ ” he told me. “I’ll say, ‘A mistake is something we do without intention. A bad decision was made intentionally.’ If you’re classifying your bad decisions as mistakes, you’re not accepting responsibility.”

In the era of rising discontent over injustice, some Americans accused of white-collar crimes have sought to identify with the movement to curb incarceration and prosecutorial misconduct. So far, the spirit of redemption has not extended to the members of the White Collar Support Group, whose crimes relate to some of the very abuses of power that inspire demands for greater accountability. For the moment, they are caught between competing furies, so they rely, more than ever, on one another. “A white-collar advocate still doesn’t have a seat at the table of the larger criminal-justice conversation,” Grant told me. “We exist because there’s no place else for us to go.”

The group members’ predicament rests on an unavoidable hypocrisy: after conducting themselves with little concern for the public, they find themselves appealing to the public for mercy. Baroni, the former Port Authority executive, told me, “I can’t go back. All I can do now is to take the experiences that I’ve had and try and help people.” His regrets extend beyond his scandal. He had been a New Jersey state senator, and, he said, “I voted to increase mandatory minimum sentencing. I never would have done that had I had the experience of being in prison.”

Baroni recently helped establish a nonprofit called the Prison Visitation Fund, which, if it can raise money, promises to pay travel expenses for family members who can’t afford to travel. His partner, and first funder, in the endeavor is a former lawyer named Gordon Caplan, who is one of fifty-seven defendants in the college-admissions scandal known as Operation Varsity Blues. Caplan was a co-chairman of the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher until 2019, when he was indicted for paying seventy-five thousand dollars for a test proctor to fix his daughter’s A.C.T. exam. “To be honest,” Caplan said, on an F.B.I. recording at the time, “I’m not worried about the moral issue here.” He pleaded guilty and was sent to a federal prison camp in Loretto, Pennsylvania, a minimum-security facility that houses low-risk offenders with less than ten years left on their sentences.

Caplan was one of America’s most prominent lawyers, but he never paid much attention to complaints about the criminal-justice system until he was in the maw of it. “What I saw is other people going through a system that’s built for failure, built for recidivism,” he told me recently. Caplan had presumed that incarcerated people had reasonable access to job training and reading materials. He was wrong. “The only courses that were offered were how to become a certified physical trainer and automotive repair.” Inmates could create their own classes, and Caplan taught a short course on basic business literacy. “I had fifteen to twenty guys every class,” he said. “ ‘Do I set up an L.L.C. versus a corporation?’ ‘Should I borrow money or should I get people to invest in equity?’ ” Since getting out, Caplan has been alarmed by the barriers that prevent even nonviolent felons from rebuilding a life. “I have assets and I have family and I’ve got all that. But how does a guy who came out for dealing marijuana even start a painting business?”

Hearing Caplan, Grant, and others talk about their sudden understanding of America’s penal system put me in mind of the work of Bryan Stevenson, a leading civil-rights lawyer and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which advocates for criminal-justice reform. He beseeches people to “get proximate”—to step outside the confines of their experience. Stevenson often quotes his grandmother, the daughter of enslaved people, who went on to raise nine children. “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan,” she told him. “You have to get close.”

But getting close is not the same as staying close. After serving twenty-eight days in prison, Caplan returned to Greenwich, where he lives in a seven-million-dollar Colonial, down the hill from the old Helmsley estate. For all his recent concern about the failings of criminal justice, I suspected that the country might have more to learn from him about his own failings. What, I asked, possessed him to pay someone to falsify his kid’s college-admissions test results? He was not eager to answer. “Achievement, I think, is like a drug,” he said, after a pause. “Once you achieve one thing, you need to achieve the next thing. And, when you’re surrounded by people that are doing that, it becomes self-reinforcing. When you also have insecurities, which a lot of highly motivated people do, you’re more apt to do what is necessary to achieve. And it’s easy to step off the line.” Caplan convinced himself that paying to change his daughter’s test results was scarcely more objectionable than other forms of influence and leverage that get kids into school. “I saw what I believed to be a very corrupt system, and I’ve got to play along or I’ll be disadvantaged.”

Greed, of course, is older than the Ten Commandments. But Caplan’s experience illuminated the degree to which greed has been celebrated in America by the past two generations, engineered for lucrative new applications that, in efficiency and effect, are as different from their predecessors as an AR-15 rifle is from a musket. If you have the means, you can hone every edge, from your life expectancy to the amount of taxes you pay and your child’s performance on the A.C.T.s. It’s not hard to insure that the winners keep winning, as long as you don’t get caught.

In the most candid moments on the Zoom call, people acknowledged the damage that their crimes had inflicted on their spouses and children. Seth Williams, a former district attorney of Philadelphia, pleaded guilty in 2017 to accepting gifts in exchange for favors, and served nearly three years in federal prison. Afterward, he struggled to find an apartment that would accept a felon. His first job was stocking shelves overnight at a big-box store; eventually, after an online course, he became a wedding officiant for hire. He was not surprised that former colleagues avoided him, but watching the effects on his family left him in despair. “It affects all of us in how our children are treated at their schools, on the playground,” he said. “Some of our spouses, people want nothing to do with them.”

Not long ago, Grant regained his law license in the State of New York, based largely on his work as a minister and as an expert on preparing for prison and life after. Nineteen years after being disbarred, he rented an office on West Forty-third Street in Manhattan and started practicing again, as a private general counsel and a specialist in “white-collar crisis management.” At seminary, he had studied migrant communities, and he came to see an analogy to people convicted of white-collar crimes. “We have one foot in the old country, one foot in the new,” he told me. If they hoped to thrive again, they would have to depend on one another. “Greek Americans funded each other and opened diners. They lift each other up.” He went on, “The problem we have in the white-collar community is that people who have been prosecuted for white-collar crimes want to become so successful again that they are no longer associated with it. I’ve approached some of the household names, and to a one they’ve rejected it.” I asked him if he was referring to people like Michael Milken and Martha Stewart. Grant demurred. “My mission is to help people relieve their shame, not to shame someone into doing something.”

Grant will tell you that shame does not help in recovery. But America’s record in recent years suggests that, in the nation at large, too little shame attaches to white-collar crime. If the country has begun to appreciate the structural reasons that many of its least advantaged people break the law, it has yet to reckon with the question of why many of its most advantaged do, too. Members of Grant’s group usually come to accept that they got themselves into trouble, but more than a few hope to follow Milken and Stewart back to the club they used to belong to—winners of the American game.

As the Zoom meeting wound down, Grant asked Andy Tezna, the former NASA executive on his way to prison, if there was anything else he wanted to say. “I had a lapse of judgment,” he began, then caught himself and confessed impatience with the language of confession. “I’m so tired of using that word, but, whatever it was that led me to make my mistake, it’s not going to define me for the rest of my life.” He thanked the members of the group for helping him get ready to embark on his “government-mandated retreat.” He’d see them afterward, he said, “once I’m out, a little wiser, a little older, with a few more gray hairs.” ♦

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Crime — White Collar Crime

Essays on White Collar Crime

White collar crime is a topic that has gained increasing attention in recent years. As a result, there is a growing demand for research and analysis on this subject. When it comes to writing an essay on white collar crime, choosing the right topic is crucial. A well-chosen topic not only makes the writing process more enjoyable, but it also ensures that your essay will be engaging and relevant. In this article, we will discuss the importance of choosing the right white collar crime essay topic and provide a detailed list of recommended topics.

White collar crime encompasses a wide range of illegal activities committed by individuals or organizations in a professional or business environment. This includes fraud, bribery, insider trading, embezzlement, and money laundering, among others. Given the complexity and prevalence of white collar crime, it is an important topic for academic study and research. Understanding the causes, impacts, and consequences of white collar crime is essential for developing effective prevention and enforcement strategies.

When choosing a white collar crime essay topic, it is important to consider your interests, the relevance of the topic, and the availability of research material. Selecting a topic that aligns with your interests will make the writing process more enjoyable and engaging. Additionally, ensure that the topic is relevant and timely, as this will make your essay more compelling and valuable. Finally, consider the availability of research material on the chosen topic to ensure that you have access to credible and up-to-date sources.

List of the Right White Collar Crime Essay Topic

Corporate fraud.

• The impact of corporate fraud on the economy
• Ethical considerations in corporate fraud investigations
• The role of corporate culture in preventing fraud

Financial Crimes

• Money laundering regulations and enforcement
• The psychology of white collar criminals
• The evolution of financial crime in the digital age

Regulatory Compliance

• The effectiveness of regulatory compliance programs
• The impact of regulatory changes on white collar crime
• Regulatory challenges in combating white collar crime

Corruption and Bribery

• The impact of corruption on developing economies
• Best practices for preventing bribery in international business
• The role of technology in detecting and preventing corruption

Insider Trading

• The legal and ethical implications of insider trading
• The impact of insider trading on market integrity
• Enforcement challenges in combating insider trading

Environmental Crimes

• The role of corporations in environmental crime prevention
• The impact of environmental crimes on public health
• Regulatory and enforcement challenges in combating environmental crimes

Healthcare Fraud

• The impact of healthcare fraud on patient care and costs
• Best practices for detecting and preventing healthcare fraud
• Regulatory and enforcement challenges in combating healthcare fraud

These are just a few of the many White Collar Crime essay topics that you can explore in your research and writing. Whether you are studying law, business, economics, or criminology, these topics provide a rich and diverse landscape for academic inquiry and analysis.

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1 Core Themes in the Study of White-Collar Crime

Michael L. Benson, PhD, is Professor of Criminology and Director of the Center for Criminal Justice Research at the University of Cincinnati.

Shanna R. Van Slyke is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice in the Department of Economic Crime and Justice Studies at Utica College, NY.

Francis T. Cullen is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus and a Senior Research Associate in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. He is author of Environmental Corrections. His current research focuses on the organization of criminological knowledge and on rehabilitation as a correctional policy. He is a past ↵president of both the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

• Published: 07 April 2016
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This chapter introduces the eight core themes that guided the selection of essays in this Handbook. These are (1) concept, (2) offender, (3) organization, (4) choice, (5) opportunity, (6) context, (7) costs, and (8) control. These themes have guided investigations and policy debates on white-collar crime and white-collar offenders for the past half-century. Like any area of vigorous scholarship, the study of white-collar crime is replete with theoretical controversies and unanswered empirical questions, but a great deal has been learned nevertheless since Sutherland coined the term. In this chapter, key research findings in the eight thematic areas are identified, major topics of theoretical debate that currently engage the field are explicated, and policy implications regarding the control of white-collar crime are discussed.

This anthology was designed to present a wide-ranging collection of cutting-edge research and theory on white-collar crime and its control. The process of assembling and organizing the various strands of research was guided by eight interconnected themes: (1) concept, (2) offender, (3) organization, (4) choice, (5) opportunity, (6) context, (7) costs, and (8) control. Although all of the essays present important insights and findings related to their specific topics, a number of general conclusions that link to our eight themes and that apply across the articles stand out. They include the following:

The definition of white-collar crime remains controversial and substantially influences who and what is studied as well as general conclusions about the nature of white-collar crime;

Regardless of how white-collar crime is defined, white-collar offenders differ from street offenders in regard to their social backgrounds, demographic attributes, and psychological characteristics;

Especially when compared to those who commit violent crimes, those who commit white-collar crimes appear to be more strongly influenced by rational choice considerations;

Like other types of crime, white-collar crime is not gender neutral in either motivations or mechanics;

Individuals who hold executive or managerial positions in organizations have abundant opportunities to engage in white-collar crime with a low likelihood of being caught;

Certain organizational features can create a criminogenic context that facilitates the concealment of white-collar criminal activity and limits the likelihood of its punishment;

Although difficult to measure with any degree of accuracy, the economic costs of white-collar crime outweigh the costs of other forms of crime; and

Different control mechanisms are used against white-collar criminals as opposed to street criminals, with white-collar crime control oriented toward regulation and the fostering of compliance while street crime control focuses on punishment and deterrence.

Below we explicate the eight themes that guided the anthology.

Although the term “white-collar crime” was not coined until near the middle of the 20th century, scholarly interest in what can only be called “white-collar criminals” goes back much farther in the history of criminology (Geis, Chapter 2 in this volume). For example, Lombroso (1887) compared “born criminals” to “criminaloids,” some of whom were people “high in power, who society venerates as its chiefs … their high position generally prevents their criminal character from being recognized” (p. 47). And at the turn of the 20th century, Ross also drew attention to the criminaloid or as he sometimes called such persons, the quasi-criminal: “He is a buyer rather than a practitioner of sin, and his middlemen spare him unpleasant details. Secure in his quilted armor of lawyer-spun sophistries… . The wholesale fleecer of trusting, workaday people is a ‘Napoleon,’ a ‘superman’ ” (1907, p. 53). But neither Lombroso’s criminaloid nor Ross’s quasi-criminal captured the criminological imagination like Edwin H. Sutherland’s white-collar criminal.

Even though Sutherland’s catchy term—white-collar crime—is relatively new historically speaking, the behavior that it references is ancient. Fraud has a history that can be traced back millennia, long before Lombroso and Ross put pen to paper ( Geis 1988 ; Johnstone 1998 ; Holtfreter, Van Slyke, and Blomberg 2005 ; Geis, Chapter 2 in this volume). In an analysis of Cicero’s (44 b.c .) On Duties and Dante’s (1314) Inferno , Chevigny (2001) showed that fraud and deception have been viewed as the most reprehensible of all crimes throughout much of human history. Indeed, it is only recently, as life has come to be seen as precious and as fear of death has heightened, that violence has come to be seen as the more reprehensible form of crime ( Pinker, 2012 ). Still, despite the historical recognition and condemnation of fraud, Lombroso, Ross, and Sutherland highlighted a special feature of its waywardness: it is committed by powerful offenders —those who hold privileged positions and who use the trust of others to break the law in order to maximize their personal power and wealth. All three noted that the misdeeds of the powerful often go unpunished for long periods of time and that they can adversely affect the fortunes of entire nations.

Geis’s (Chapter 2 ) essay in this volume illustrates how strands of thought from diverse scholarly and professional fields—all connected by the image of a powerful and power-abusing victimizer—merged in the conceptualization of white-collar crime that Sutherland presented in his Presidential Address to the American Sociological Society in 1939. Sutherland later defined it as “crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation” (1949, p. 9). From this definition and his other writings, five key features stand out in regard to Sutherland’s view of white-collar crime. First, the offenders were, by definition, individuals of high social status and respectability. Second, the offenses were committed within an occupational context. Third, the offenses were committed in a particular way—that is, through the “violation of delegated or implied trust” (1940, p. 3). Fourth, the offenses involved massive financial and other costs (e. g., to “social relations” [1949, p. 13]). Fifth and finally, civil and administrative violations could be counted as white-collar crimes because civil laws often deal with practices that are fundamentally similar to those proscribed by criminal laws and because many illegal practices can be sanctioned under either criminal or civil law and often both.

Sutherland’s approach to defining white-collar crime has been defended and followed by many distinguished white-collar crime scholars, such as, for example, Pontell (Chapter 3 in this volume) and Braithwaite (1985) . This approach to defining white-collar crime has been labeled the “offender-based approach” because of its focus on the social characteristics of the offenders ( Benson and Simpson 2014 ). Despite the fundamental importance of Sutherland’s insight into lawbreaking among those of high social status, the meaning of the concept of white-collar crime has mutated radically since the term was introduced.

Although Sutherland’s approach to defining white-collar crime is the one that resonates best with popular stereotypes of white-collar offenders, a competing conceptual approach emerged only a few decades after his address. This approach focuses on the nature of the offense rather than the offender. The most influential offense-based definition was promulgated by Edelhertz (1970 , p. 3), who defined white-collar crime as “an illegal act or series of illegal acts committed by nonphysical means and by concealment or guile, to obtain money or property, to avoid the loss of money or property, or to obtain business or personal advantage.” Edelhertz’s definition differs from Sutherland’s in important ways. It makes no reference to the social status of the actor or to the occupational location of the act. Rather, it focuses entirely on the means by which the illegal act is committed. Thus, for Edelhertz, any illegal act that is committed by “non-physical means and by concealment or guile” for economic or personal advantage is a white-collar crime.

As both Geis (Chapter 2 in this volume) and Pontell (Chapter 3 in this volume) argue, offense-based definitions enlarge the conceptual boundaries of white-collar crime far beyond the high-powered corporate executives that so concerned Sutherland. In Pontell’s view, this expansion has the effect of producing the “a priori operational trivialization of white-collar crime” as researchers end up studying a heterogeneous collection of small-time fraudsters and trust violators. He blames offense-based definitions for inadequate regulatory policies and largely inadequate if not entirely absent criminal laws against the harmful behaviors of society’s elites. Whereas the objective of Sutherland was to call attention to the misdeeds of the powerful, the objective of Edelhertz was to provide a definition more consistent with legal norms—that is, offense-based definitions are designed to reflect justice system policy and practice. This conceptual bowdlerization not only perpetuates and reinforces existing disparities in the operation of the justice system between white-collar and street crimes, but it also diverts attention from those deceptive acts that cause the most harm and that are committed by economic and political elites.

The defenders of Sutherland’s approach make a valid point regarding the potential dangers of defining white-collar crime in the manner suggested by Edelhertz. If using an offense-based approach means that high-status offenders end up being ignored, then criminology is not much better off than it would have been had the concept of white-collar crime never been invented. Sutherland was correct that crimes by powerful people in his day were ignored. If contemporary criminologists end up studying only small-time fraudsters and welfare mothers, then the theoretical value of the concept of white-collar crime is seriously diminished. Yet, it cannot be denied that people who do not have exalted social status commit crimes that for all intents and purposes are the same as the white-collar crimes committed by Sutherland’s corporate executives ( Weisburd et al. 1991 ). Corporate executives engage in accounting fraud and tax evasion, and so do small business owners. Bank presidents can misappropriate millions of dollars ( Calavita and Pontell 1990 ) while bank tellers embezzle a few hundred bucks. Researchers using the offense-based approach have brought this reality sharply into focus, and they have also demonstrated that both elite and non-elite white-collar offenders differ substantially on a number of dimensions from ordinary street offenders ( Wheeler et al. 1988 ; Weisburd et al. 1991 ; Benson and Kerley 2000 ; Benson and Simpson 2014 ).

At present, the term “white-collar crime” is used in both senses by researchers. For some researchers, it refers to the corrupt, exploitative, and socially harmful acts of respectable and powerful individuals and organizations; for others, it refers more broadly to economic crimes that involve deception. As this volume demonstrates, both definitional approaches have been used by researchers to produce important findings and insights on contemporary crime problems. Since both conceptual approaches are found in the literature, it is important to pay attention to how individual researchers operationalize the term in order to accurately assess the significance of their work for the field of white-collar crime. Different definitions lead to different questions and yield different results. Not surprisingly, almost every contributor to this anthology devotes at least a few words of explanation regarding the definition that guided his or her analyses.

II. Offenders

The answer to the question “Who is the white-collar offender?” depends on how one defines white-collar crime (Klenowski and Dodson, Chapter 6 in this volume; Hochstetler and Mackey, Chapter 8 in this volume). For those who follow Sutherland’s approach, however, the question is hardly worth asking. The offenders who should concern us are, by definition, elite members of the corporate and political power structures of modern society. They are the ones who make decisions that affect the financial well-being of millions of people as well as the social and economic health of nations. What matters about them is their economic and political power, not their social or demographic characteristics. Nevertheless, it is implied in writings of Sutherland and his followers that white-collar offenders are predominantly white, male, psychologically normal, and unsullied by contact with the criminal justice system.

Sutherland undoubtedly was correct that the leaders of America’s major corporations frequently engage in behavior that is prohibited by law and that warrants sanctioning in criminal courts, even though the perpetrators rarely see the inside of a courtroom. Wealthy, high-ranking, and highly respected offenders certainly do exist, and they even occasionally appear on the nightly news or nowadays on the webpages of both major and minor news outlets. But the spotlight that is shined on the perpetrators of these national scandals reveals only a small segment of the white-collar offending population.

Researchers using offense-based definitions of white-collar crime have found that those who commit white-collar crimes are much more heterogeneous in their social, demographic, and criminal-background characteristics than the stereotypical image of the white-collar offender would suggest. Consider, for example, gender, race, and social class. Although it is true that most white-collar offenders are white and male, the female share of some low-level forms of white-collar crime, such as embezzlement and identity theft, is substantial (Klenowski and Dodson, Chapter 6 in this volume; Dodge, Chapter 10 in this volume). But the involvement of women in elite frauds, especially in leadership roles, is still exceedingly rare ( Steffensmeier et al. 2013 ; Benson and Gottschalk 2014 ). Likewise, non-whites also commit low-level white-collar offenses in significant numbers, and trend data suggest that for the past three decades both women and non-whites have been commanding an ever larger share of white-collar crime, especially in regard to low-level offenses ( Shover and Hochstetler 2006 ; Benson and Simpson 2014 ). Perhaps the most surprising findings to emerge in the past three decades, however, concern the class standing of those who commit white-collar offenses. As several of the chapters presented here note (Klenowski and Dodson, Chapter 6 ; Hochstetler and Mackey, Chapter 8 ), most of the people who end up in the federal judicial system for white-collar offenses are not wealthy and are not high-ranking corporate executives. Rather, they occupy the middle levels of the class hierarchy (Karstedt, Chapter 9 in this volume).

The expansion of the population of white-collar offenders along gender, race, and class lines has led to a new body of theory and research on their social origins and backgrounds ( Piquero and Benson 2004 ; Piquero and Piquero, Chapter 12 in this volume; Benson, Chapter 13 in this volume). Rather than simply assuming that early childhood and family experiences have little to do with white-collar offending in adulthood, researchers have begun to investigate whether involvement in white-collar crime may arise out of the childrearing practices of the middle and upper classes. Indeed, some have gone so far as to speculate that a middle-class upbringing has features that are the functional equivalents of the poverty, abuse, conflict, and neglect that play such prominent causal roles in street offending. These features include the inculcation of a sense of entitlement, an emphasis on competitive success, and a worldview in which the application of ethical norms and standards of behavior is always considered to be negotiable ( Shover and Hochstetler 2006 ). In short, like ordinary offending, white-collar offending is beginning to be explored as a behavioral pattern that is part of the life course and that arises out of a developmental process (Singer, Chapter 11 in this volume; Piquero and Piquero, Chapter 12 in this volume; Benson, Chapter 13 in this volume). In one sense, this theoretical development represents a departure from Sutherland’s perspective on white-collar offending, as he was opposed to class-based explanations of crime in general. On the other hand, it is consistent with his broader aim of reforming criminological theory, because white-collar offending is now being brought under the theoretical umbrella of life-course criminology, one of the dominant theoretical perspectives in criminology ( Cullen 2011 ).

III. Choice

The life-course perspective calls upon us to view criminal offending as part of a broader process of human development that involves biological, psychological, and social domains. But, despite the all-inclusive nature of life-course theorizing about crime, in the end, specific acts of white-collar law violation occur because specific choices are made by specific individuals or groups of individuals working in concert. A corporate executive decides to ignore the expensive regulations for storing hazardous chemicals that end up polluting a river. Midlevel sales managers in competing companies get together and decide to share customers to ensure market stability and organizational survival for all. An accountant accedes to a demand from the company CEO to figure out a way, illegal if necessary, to improve the bottom line before the next quarterly report is due on Wall Street.

In regard to white-collar crime, choices are theorized to be a function of the actor’s subjective assessment of the net rewards of crime compared to the net rewards of not engaging in crime—that is, of complying with the law ( Paternoster and Simpson 1993 ; Simpson 2013 ). The net rewards of crime are defined as the benefits of crime minus its costs; the same definition applies to non-crime as well ( Wilson and Herrnstein 1985 ). When the former exceed the latter, crime is expected to result. Although white-collar crimes are almost always economically oriented in one sense or another, the decision making of white-collar offenders involves much more than a simple assessment of how much money some particular offense might garner. In other words, decision making by business managers and executives involves more than just a cold-blooded calculation of the economic utility of different courses of action. In particular, decision makers are sensitive to the potential that they or their companies may suffer reputational costs as a result of the exposure of lawbreaking ( Paternoster and Simpson 1996 ; Shover and Hochstetler 2006 ). Indeed, these informal costs appear to figure more prominently in the decision-making calculus of offenders than formal legal sanctions ( Simpson 2013 ). Research also suggests that decision making in business is guided by moral and ethical considerations ( Simpson 2002 ; Simpson, Gardner, and Gibbs 2007 ). Those who would engage in white-collar crime may refrain from doing so if they regard the act in question as immoral or socially harmful.

On the other hand, if potential offenders believe that their actions can be framed in morally acceptable terms, then the restraining effect of morality is greatly weakened. White-collar offenders are especially adept at framing their activities to themselves in such a way that the moral and reputational costs of crime are neutralized, at least in the offender’s eyes ( Benson 1985 ; Willott, Griffen, and Torrence 2001 ; Shover and Hochstetler 2006 ; Klenowski et al. 2011 ). The ability of white-collar offenders to deny the criminality of their actions is enhanced by the complex nature of business activity and the normative ambiguity that surrounds it ( Green 2004 , 2006 ). At what point does a conversation between competitors become a price-fixing conspiracy? When does boastful advertising shade into outright consumer fraud? White-collar offenders are also insulated from the moral costs of white-collar crime by the public’s ambiguous view of government efforts to control and regulate business and economic activity ( Cullen, Chouhy, and Jonson, forthcoming ).

Like other people, white-collar offenders are not robots devoid of feelings and emotions. Indeed, emotional factors can influence choices in regard to white-collar crime ( Benson and Sams 2013 ). For example, if business owners or managers feel that they have been unfairly stigmatized or sanctioned by legal authorities, they may respond with anger and defiance rather than compliance ( Simpson 2013 ). Thus, even though the world of business is often portrayed as one in which rationality and cool calculation rule, research suggests otherwise. White-collar crime choice has an emotional component.

Finally, white-collar crime is often carried out in an organizational setting, and this setting influences criminal decision making (Tomlinson and Pozzuto, Chapter 18 in this volume). No discussion of choice in regard to white-collar crime would be complete if it did not acknowledge the organizational dimension of decision making. The idea of an isolated individual decision maker is not applicable to those who work in organizations, because people who work in organizations inevitably interact with coworkers, superiors, and subordinates as well as people who work in other organizations. In these interactions, the preferences and subjective assessments of the interacting parties are shared and become part of each individual’s decision-making gestalt.

IV. Organization

As noted above, organizations can be conceptualized as providing a setting that influences decision making. Indeed, from the perspective of choice theory, the organization is simply another source of benefits and costs that individuals take into account when deciding on various courses of action. For example, variation in the degree to which organizations monitor employee performance in regard to ethical standards will make deviant behavior potentially more costly in some organizations than in others. And there are other organizational characteristics that influence how people behave (Huisman, Chapter 21 in this volume). Tomlinson and Pozzuto (Chapter 18 in this volume) argue that three particularly important characteristics are (1) the reward system, (2) the organizational culture, and (3) the organizational structure.

Consider how an internal reward system could be designed to provoke white-collar crime. Organizations are inherently goal-seeking entities ( Gross 1978 , 1980 ). To achieve their goals, they must organize and motivate individuals to behave in ways that promote organizational goals. One way to do this is to align the achievement of organizational goals with individual benefits—that is, to reward people for doing things that lead to organizational success. For example, raises or promotions can be granted to people who meet certain sales targets or other types of productivity standards, while those who fail to meet the standards are fired, demoted, or otherwise punished. Organizations vary in how quantifiable organizational goals are and how tightly personal rewards are tied to the achievement of these goals. Enron is a classic example of an organization that had very clear financial goals and a very tightly coupled system for aligning corporate goals and individual rewards. Its infamous review and reward system required supervisors to rate a specified percentage of their subordinates as unsatisfactory and sanction them accordingly ( McLean and Elkind 2003 ). This brutal system pressured Enron’s employees to try to enhance their performance by any means available, including illegal ones.

Although it makes intuitive sense to consider organizations as settings that influence how people make decisions, act, and interact, organizations have also been conceptualized as agents in and of themselves ( Braithwaite and Fisse 1990 ; Huisman, Chapter 21 in this volume). Indeed, it has been asserted that the organizational form is inherently criminogenic ( Gross 1978 , 1980 ). A long line of research has focused on the organizational correlates of white-collar crime ( Simpson 1987 ; Zey 1993 ; Simpson 2002 ; Clinard and Yeager 2006 ; Simpson, Garner, and Gibbs 2007 ; for a general overview, see Simpson 2013 ). Many different factors have been investigated, including size, culture, profitability, hierarchical structure, strategy, type, and competitive environment. But empirical findings are inconclusive and no concise set of factors has yet been identified that predicts organizational offending with any degree of accuracy ( Simpson 2013 ).

The choice perspective assumes that criminal behavior is essentially goal-seeking behavior. The offender is viewed as an agent who wants something and chooses to use illegal means to get it. In regard to organizational offending, however, this agent-centered view is at times inappropriate, because in some cases organizations violate the law not because they choose to do so but rather because they are simply incompetent to comply with their legal obligations (Huisman, Chapter 21 in this volume). Small and medium-sized organizations in particular may not have the personnel resources or technical expertise to keep up with the voluminous regulations that govern almost all industries and economic enterprises. Their law-breaking behavior is perhaps more akin to the individual who forgets to file her taxes on time than it is to the amoral pursuit of illegal gains. Some instances of organizational deviance are best viewed as the inevitable byproduct or unintended consequences of organizational structures and routines ( Vaughan 2005 ). Organizational incompetence is not a factor that criminologists have devoted much attention to, but if organizations are to be conceptualized as actors, then we must recognize that, like people, they do not always know what they are doing and their actions are not always intentional.

V. Opportunity

Opportunities are now recognized as an important cause of all crime ( Felson and Eckert 2015 ), and in the past few decades, criminologists have focused increasingly on the situational and ecological factors that facilitate opportunities for street crime ( Cohen and Felson 1979 ; Clarke 1983 ). As causal factors, opportunities are considered to be even more important for white-collar crime. One would be hard pressed to find any study of any form of white-collar crime that does not in one way or another blame the occurrence of the crime on the offender’s having an opportunity to do it. For white-collar crime, the answer to the question “Why did they do it?” is almost always “Because they could.” The list of case studies of particular white-collar crimes that blame them on the opportunities afforded by lax regulatory oversight is, to put it mildly, large.

The nature of white-collar crime opportunities, however, differs from that of street crime ( Benson and Simpson 2014 ). Opportunities for street crime arise when a motivated offender encounters a suitable target that is not capably guarded ( Cohen and Felson 1979 ). For most street crimes, guardianship involves either somehow inhibiting the offender’s access to the target or somehow making the offender feel that undertaking the crime would be accompanied by a risk of detection that is unacceptably high. Typically, the risk of detection is raised by putting the target under surveillance.

But white-collar crime opportunities are different. The most important difference between white-collar and street crime opportunities is that white-collar offenders have legitimate access to the targets of their offenses ( Benson and Simpson 2014 ; Felson and Eckert 2015 ; Madensen, Chapter 19 in this volume). This access almost always arises out of the offender’s occupational role or position within an organization. Unlike the burglar who must break into a house to steal something, an embezzler can merely take money out of the cash register. Likewise, the doctor who submits a fraudulent claim to the Medicaid program has legitimate access to both patients and the Medicaid reimbursement system. As Marcus Felson has argued for a long time, the distinguishing feature of white-collar crimes is that the offender has specialized access to the target. Because white-collar offenders have legitimate access to the targets of their offenses, the standard crime-prevention technique of reducing crime by blocking the offender’s access to the target is difficult if not impossible to use in the case of most white-collar crimes.

In addition to having specialized access to their targets, white-collar offenders have another advantage over their street-level counterparts. That advantage resides in the superficial appearance of legitimacy of white-collar offenses. In other words, the offenses are not obvious ( Braithwaite and Geis 1982 ). For example, the doctor who submits a fraudulent claim to a healthcare insurer tries to make the claim appear like an ordinary legitimate claim. The manufacturer who illegally disposes of hazardous waste may take steps to make the waste appear nonhazardous, such as by mislabeling the barrel that contains it ( Rebovich 1992 ). The fraudulent and misleading financial reports published by Enron were good enough to fool many sophisticated investors ( McLean and Elkind 2003 ). The victims of Bernard Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme were blissfully unaware that the financial statements they received from him were wildly inflated ( Henriques 2011 ). Indeed, a distinguishing feature of many white-collar crimes is that even the victim often is unaware of the offense until it is too late to respond, and in some cases victims may never learn of the offense. The superficial appearance of legitimacy means that the types of surveillance used to prevent street crime—such as reports from victims, observation by security guards, or closed-circuit cameras—are virtually useless in regard to white-collar crimes. Other forms of surveillance or oversight are needed to prevent white-collar crimes, and when they are lacking or insufficient opportunities for white-collar crime expand.

For white-collar crimes, surveillance must be specialized and usually is carried out by regulatory agencies. In theory, these agencies are supposed to provide oversight by inspecting places of business and reviewing business records and activities to make sure that they comply with the law. But, as scholars from Sutherland forward have repeatedly pointed out, regulatory oversight is almost always inadequate, and even when violations are discovered the penalties associated with them are usually bearable for offenders ( Shover and Hochstetler 2006 ). As with ordinary street offenders, white-collar offenders feel much more comfortable executing their schemes if they are confident that no one is watching or that the costs of being caught are not too high. Under these conditions, opportunities to engage in white-collar crimes surely seem plentiful and attractive to potential offenders. Thus, the inadequacy of regulatory oversight is a major element in the opportunity structure of white-collar crime.

Regulatory oversight so often lacks credibility because both regulation and oversight are parts of a political process that is riddled with conflicting and competing interests (Ramirez, Chapter 23 in this volume). Every industry and profession in the United States hires lobbyists to advocate for the special interests of their employers in the halls of Congress and in the offices and meeting rooms of regulatory agencies. These special interests work tirelessly to diminish regulatory restrictions, especially those that might lead to criminal accountability for anyone in the industry or profession (Ramirez, Chapter 23 in this volume). Occasionally, a scandal is so large and outrageous that the public demands action and as a result new rules and regulations are enacted. For example, after the accounting scandals of the early 2000s, the U.S. Congress passed the law popularly known as Sarbanes-Oxley that in theory is supposed to prevent future accounting frauds by strengthening regulatory oversight of the internal accounting practices of large companies and raising penalties for transgressions. As soon as the public’s attention wanes and turns elsewhere, however, special interests begin whittling away at the strength of the enforcement process until eventually real enforcement gives way to the appearance but not reality of oversight and accountability.

Finally, opportunities for white-collar crime continually evolve as financial and technological innovations create new products and new forms of business activity. For example, the massive amount of fraud that occurred in the mortgage and investment banking industries between 2000 and 2008 was made possible in part by such financial innovations as the invention of the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) as an investment vehicle ( Barnett 2013 ). CDOs were so complicated and so little understood by investors and regulators that it was not hard for the major investment banks to market them in a fraudulent manner ( Barnett 2013 ). The evolution of the Internet and online banking coupled with the expansion of consumer credit has made identity theft both more feasible and more lucrative ( Copes and Vieraitis 2012 ). As recent scandals involving such major corporations as Target and Home Depot show, it is now possible to steal the financial identities of millions of people at a time and get access to their lines of credit. For identity thieves, opportunity started knocking in the 1990s. As the economy and technology evolve over time, opportunities for white-collar crimes follow in their wake, leading some scholars to proclaim white-collar crime as the crime of the future ( Weisburd et al. 1991 ; Shover and Hochstetler 2006 ; Benson and Simpson 2014 ).

VI. Context

As the preceding section discussed, opportunities for white-collar crime are shaped in part by political processes. These processes in turn are part of a larger institutional and cultural context that influences both opportunities and motivations for white-collar crime ( Bonger and Horton 1916 ; Coleman 1987 ). Nearly a century ago, Bonger and Horton (1916) argued that capitalism itself created a moral climate of egoism that inflamed the desire for material success, thus providing a potent source of motivation for crime in all social classes (Simpson and Rorie, Chapter 16 in this volume). More recently, as Headworth and Hagan (Chapter 14 in this volume) show in their analysis of white-collar crime in the financial crisis of 2008, the cultural landscape of the United States has for some time been dominated by an “orientation toward financial markets that privileges the notions of self-regulation and self-correction over government intervention.” As a result of this orientation, individuals working in the financial markets prior to 2008 felt both entitled and empowered to develop complex and little-understood financial instruments, such as CDOs based on pools of subprime loans. Then, in the name of economic growth and with the unwitting backing of the U.S. government, these financial instruments were marketed using fraud and deceit to unsuspecting investors. And when the underlying assets—that is, subprime loans on which the instruments were based—began to fail, the economy followed suit.

Although it is tempting and to a certain degree correct to blame the economic collapse of 2008 on the financial malfeasance of greedy and self-serving investment bankers as well as the fraudulent activities of others who worked in the mortgage industry, this individualized view tells only a small part of the story. Before it can be activated, greed needs an outlet, an opportunity to manifest itself—and the opportunity to engage in the financial malfeasance with little risk of sanction throughout most of the first decade of the 21st century was created by the U.S. government. As Headworth and Hagan (Chapter 14 in this volume) and Prechel (Chapter 15 in this volume) show, the government played a key role in shaping and deregulating financial markets. It pushed the investment banking industry to develop the complex structured debt instruments that were marketed to investors ( Barnett 2013 ). Through deregulation, it “altered the boundaries of legitimacy, legality, and criminality in finance, expanding the realm of explicitly or implicitly sanctioned behaviors” (Headworth and Hagan, Chapter 14 in this volume). The cultural milieu that infused capital markets provided actors with justifications for their risky financial innovations and transactions, while the structure of banking organizations as well as the market itself ensured that responsibility would be diffused to such a degree that finding responsible parties in the aftermath of the collapse became virtually impossible. Hence, almost none of the “big players” in the investment banking world have been criminally charged, let alone convicted, despite widespread agreement among commentators that fraud was rampant leading up to the collapse of 2008 ( Benson 2012 ; Levi 2012 ; Barnett 2013 ).

The onslaught of fraud in the mortgage and investment banking industries prior to 2008 is only one example of how cultural and institutional contexts can create conditions in which white-collar and corporate crime can flourish. But it is certainly not the only example. Indeed, there is a strong theoretical and research tradition in the white-collar crime literature that focuses on interconnections between economic fluctuations, cultural contexts, and rates of white-collar and corporate crime (Simpson and Rorie, Chapter 16 in this volume). This research tends to show that the effects of economic fluctuations are crime specific—that is, some forms of white-collar crime are more sensitive to economic fluctuations than others. The research also shows that both economic booms and economic recessions can influence different forms of corporate and white-collar crime in different ways, because both booms and recessions can affect motivations and opportunities ( Benson 2012 ; Levi 2012 ). For example, economic recessions can put struggling businesses under enormous pressure and threaten them with total failure. Under these conditions, it is almost axiomatic that some owners and executives will respond by breaking the law in an attempt to keep their failing enterprises from going under. On the other hand, an expanding economy can lead to a mad scramble to get in on the action and make money by any means necessary as quickly as one can. The thrift scandal of the 1980s is an excellent example of this dynamic ( Calavita and Pontell 1990 ).

Thus, if anything has been learned since Sutherland introduced the world to white-collar crime, it is that (1) white-collar crime feeds off of and is inextricably linked to legitimate economic activity and (2) opportunities for white-collar crime expand or contract depending on the evolution of political-legal arrangements and the pendulum-like swings in cultural orientations that oscillate between belief in the efficacy of government regulation versus faith in the invisible hand of the free market (Prechel, Chapter 15 in this volume).

Measuring social phenomena is often difficult, and this is especially true in regard to phenomena such as criminal activity, which is by its very nature meant to be clandestine. Nevertheless, those who study ordinary street crime have made some strides in measuring its extent, trends, and costs. The extent can be estimated by mathematically combining information about the number of offenses known to the authorities with information about reporting rates for those offenses to get a rough number for the overall annual crime rate. The number can then be tracked over time to determine whether crime is increasing or decreasing. And by employing a little more mathematical wizardry, researchers have even been able to get better-than-ballpark estimates of how many offenses active offenders commit in a given time period. Once the number of offenses is known, trends in the overall costs of street crime can be estimated by multiplying the average cost per offense by the number of estimated offenses.

It seems reasonable to expect that the costs of white-collar crime also vary over time, and that they also trend up or down depending on how active white-collar offenders are. If we could count the number of white-collar crimes, we would be on our way toward estimating its costs. Counting, however, turns out to be a problem, and very little is known about the dark figure of white-collar crime. As numerous scholars have noted, for various reasons estimating the amount of white-collar crime to any reasonable degree of accuracy seems to be a very difficult task, if not one that is outright unachievable ( Sparrow 1996 ; Shover and Hochstetler 2006 ). Thus, estimating the costs of white-collar and corporate crime is a project accompanied by large margins of error.

Estimating the amount of white-collar crime is complicated for both conceptual and substantive reasons. Conceptually, estimation of the amount of white-collar crime depends crucially on how the term is defined (Croall, Chapter 4 in this volume). Offense-based definitions, which typically include any property offense involving deceit or deception, result in dramatically higher white-collar offense counts than do offender-based definitions, which include only occupationally related offenses committed by high-status individuals. Dramatically higher counts are also achieved if regulatory violations are included along with criminal violations. Substantively, white-collar crime is difficult to count because the offenses are not obvious and do not leave easily observed traces of their occurrence ( Braithwaite and Geis 1982 ; Benson, Kennedy, and Logan, forthcoming ). Instead, the crime itself is typically hidden behind or integrated into legitimate occupational or financial activities ( Benson and Simpson 2014 ). Often, even the victim may not realize that an offense has occurred. For example, healthcare professionals who submit fraudulent claims to the health insurers or government programs try to make them look like legitimate claims and hope, often correctly, that they will go unnoticed ( Jesilow, Geis, and Pontell 1991 ; Sparrow 1996 ). Even when a white-collar offense has been discovered, it can still be difficult to put a dollar value on it (Cohen, Chapter 5 in this volume).

Nevertheless, despite these conceptual and substantive difficulties, there are a number of points of agreement about the amount and costs of white-collar crime. First, white-collar crime is widespread and its costs outweigh those of ordinary street crime by several orders of magnitude (Croall, Chapter 4 in this volume; Cohen, Chapter 5 in this volume). Second, either directly or indirectly white-collar crime affects almost everyone (Croall, Chapter 4 in this volume; Cohen, Chapter 5 in this volume). For example, fraud in the mortgage and investment banking industries recently has been implicated in the economic collapse of 2008 ( Barnett 2013 ; Simpson and Rorie, Chapter 16 in this volume), and in the 1980s fraud in the savings and loan industry cost taxpayers literally billions of dollars ( Calavita and Pontell 1990 ). And there are more subtle costs that cannot be so easily calculated in dollars and cents. Consider how the presence of harmful chemicals in the environment, food, or consumer products may lead to illness and reduced quality of life (Croall, Chapter 4 in this volume). In addition to the physical and financial costs of white-collar crime, it may also have severe psychological effects. For example, many of the victims of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme described themselves as emotionally devastated by the loss of their life savings ( Henriques 2011 ), as were the employees of Enron who lost their retirement accounts when it went bankrupt ( McLean and Elkind 2003 ).

Finally, as Cohen (Chapter 5 in this volume) perceptively notes, the costs of white-collar crime also include what he calls “avoidance behaviors.” Avoidance behavior refers to actions taken by individuals and businesses to avoid becoming a victim of a white-collar crime, or in the case of businesses to avoid being mistakenly charged with a crime. For example, purchasing a credit monitoring service to protect oneself against identity theft is a form of avoidance behavior and also can be considered a cost of white-collar crime. Avoidance behaviors also include actions taken by governments to help prevent crime. Consumer education campaigns and consumer protection agencies help prevent white-collar crimes, but they also cost tax dollars and add to the money lost to white-collar crime.

VIII. Control

For a variety of reasons, white-collar crime poses special problems for criminal justice agencies. First, the crimes themselves are difficult to detect because they are often camouflaged as legitimate business activities ( Braithwaite and Geis 1982 ; Benson and Simpson 2014 ). Second, even when a white-collar crime does come to light, if it is committed in an organizational setting, it can be difficult for investigators and prosecutors to pinpoint a responsible party—that is, an individual or group of individuals who can be convicted and sent to jail ( Benson and Cullen 1998 ). Indeed, prosecutors often face a difficult decision over whether to charge the corporation itself or some individual involved in the offense (Dervan and Podgor, Chapter 27 in this volume). Third, the investigation of crimes committed in organizational settings can be extremely complex, time-consuming, and resource-intensive (Dervan and Podgor, Chapter 27 in this volume). Furthermore, the defendants in white-collar cases have abundant legal and financial resources with which to fight criminal charges by taking full advantage of the procedural safeguards that are built into modern legal systems to protect against the coercive use of authority by criminal justice officials ( Mann 1985 ). For all of these considerations, prosecutors have reason to be chary of trying to use criminal sanctions to control white-collar crime.

That white-collar crime and corporate crime pose a grave threat to individuals and society should, by now, be obvious. “Crime in relation to business,” as Sutherland (1940) called it, has given us financial scoundrels who steal billions, environmental disasters that destroy habitats and require billions to clean up, and workplace tragedies whose emotional and physical costs are so appalling that it is tasteless to put a price on them. In light of the size and severity of the problem, one might think that white-collar crime control would be a top priority at all levels of government, but that would be a mistake. With as close to a universal consensus as one can get among scholars, those who study white-collar crime agree that the governmental responses to white-collar crime control are inadequate at best and laughable at worst. Nevertheless, even though official responses to white-collar crime can be fairly described as “limp” ( Shover and Hochstetler 2006 ), they are not entirely absent, nor are they entirely ineffective. In the final section of this chapter, we describe the different approaches that are used to control white-collar crime, focusing primarily on regulatory oversight and criminal sanctions.

On the rare occasions when prosecutors do move forward and secure convictions against “respectable offenders,” it is not exactly clear how they should be sentenced or what the most appropriate sanction is (Levi, Chapter 28 in this volume). On the one hand, it seems important to send a message that the law applies to rich and poor alike, and therefore it is appropriate to send white-collar offenders to prison. On the other hand, however, one can ask if it makes sense to spend money incarcerating individuals who pose little risk of future dangerousness purely for the sake of punishment. Thus, in sentencing white-collar offenders, judges face a paradox of how to blend the severity that public opinion demands with the leniency that correctional theory would suggest is appropriate ( Wheeler, Mann, and Sarat 1988 ; Levi, Chapter 28 in this volume). The evidence is mixed as to how they resolve this paradox, with some studies finding that upper-world offenders are sentenced more harshly than comparable lower-status counterparts ( Tillman and Pontell 1992 ; Van Slyke and Bales 2012 ), while other studies find little in the way of class-based differences in sentence severity ( Hagan and Nagel 1982 ; Wheeler, Weisburd, and Bode 1982 ; Hagan and Palloni 1986 ; Benson and Walker 1988 ). Even though there is some evidence that incarceration rates and sentence lengths for white-collar offenders have increased in the past two decades ( Stadler, Benson, and Cullen 2013 ), the likelihood that we will ever witness a mass incarceration movement directed at business executives is vanishingly small.

Although the criminal justice system has an important role to play in controlling crime in relation to business, especially in egregious cases, responsibility for the day-to-day oversight and control of harmful activities in business falls mainly on regulatory agencies. And it is within the framework of regulation that the major policy initiatives regarding the control of business activities are put forth. Both the day-to-day administration and enforcement of regulatory rules and the overall form and structure of regulatory policy are perennially controversial topics.

Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find a more controversial and longstanding subject than the proper role of government in the marketplace. When is government intervention necessary and when should matters should be left to the invisible hand of the market (Gunningham, Chapter 24 in this volume)? Should regulatory inspectors act like law-enforcement agents seeking to find and punish all rule violations, or should they take a more conciliatory, responsive approach to their work with regulated entities and try to help them comply with the law ( Fisse and Braithwaite 1993 ; Gunningham, Chapter 24 in this volume)? Do regulations work, or is their effectiveness inevitably eviscerated by special interests working behind closed doors (Ramirez, Chapter 23 in this volume)? What should be done with transnational organizations that seem to operate outside the jurisdiction of any single governmental authority ( Braithwaite 1993 )? These are but a few of the many ongoing debates over the need for and effectiveness of regulation.

Regarding the effectiveness of regulation, the idea that lax regulation or lack of credible oversight is a fundamental cause of white-collar crime has the status of something approaching a biblical truth among white-collar and corporate crime scholars. A particularly compelling analysis of the role of inadequate regulatory oversight in corporate crime can be found in Ramirez’s study (Chapter 23 in this volume) of the financial scandals of the preceding decade. Ramirez recounts a familiar story in which the response to public outrage over some corporate scandal leads to the passage of new “tough” regulations. But after the public’s attention turns elsewhere, special interests work to “diminish regulatory restrictions and to subvert criminal accountability” (Ramirez, Chapter 23 in this volume). Throughout the history of regulation, scandal and outrage have often led to new regulations that are passed with great fanfare only to be quietly eroded later by the lobbying and backroom deals of special interests.

But even regulations that have been eroded can still have some level of effectiveness, and there are differing opinions on how best to judge effectiveness (Mascini, Chapter 25 in this volume). If effectiveness is judged by the application of tough regulatory sanctions to rule violations, then there is little evidence of that. However, as Mascini (Chapter 25 in this volume) notes, the movements toward responsive regulation and regulatory governance take a more polycentric as opposed to state-centric view of regulation. Under a responsive regulation system, the effectiveness of regulation is judged not so much by how many rule violations are sanctioned but instead by the degree to which harm is reduced and the interests of civil society are protected. According to proponents of responsive regulation, this is most likely to be achieved when regulators work cooperatively with regulated entities ( Ayres and Braithwaite 1992 ). Likewise, the regulatory governance model views the state, the market (i.e., corporations and other business entities), and civil society as part of a comprehensive and interlocking system through which socially responsible behavior by businesses is promoted.

Whether the happy and cooperative state of affairs envisioned by the regulatory governance and responsive regulation models is ever actually achieved in the market place is debated and depends on where you look (Mascini, Chapter 25 in this volume). There have been some success stories. For example, the airline industry has made important contributions to the safety of air travel. But there are also many industrial sectors where market participants have done little to improve the safety of workers or consumers and have vigorously resisted efforts by governments to do so ( Cullen et al. 2006 ). The effectiveness of different regulatory models is, therefore, difficult to evaluate as counterexamples can always be found. In the end, the “holy grail” of regulation may never be found, because “policy ideas on regulatory inspection are founded on conflicting conceptions of the good society” (Mascini, Chapter 25 in this volume).

IX. Conclusion

This Handbook was designed to bring together contemporary cutting-edge thinking on the problem of white-collar crime and its control. In regard to that goal, we believe we have succeeded, but we are also aware that a field as broad and deep as white-collar crime can never be captured in a single handbook, at least not in one that could be lifted by a normal person. Thus, in selecting what areas to cover and how many chapters to devote to them, we have necessarily had to be selective. This book could easily have had twice as many chapters and been twice as long. Nevertheless, we believe readers will find something of value here on each of the eight themes that guided our work—concept, offender, organization, choice, opportunity, context, costs, and control.

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Law Enforcement: White-Collar and Corporate Crimes Essay

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White-collar crime as described by Edward Sutherland from the interactionist school of thought is crimes committed by people of high social status and class. It includes crimes such as fraud, embezzlement, bankruptcy fraud, insider dealing, public corruption, identity theft, pension fund crime, occupational crime, and the likes of all those activities that are done by people of high standards and education. These crimes are usually done through computers or by means of paper. They account for around $300b in losses as stated by the FBI. It is also a fact that these crimes largely go undetected and are therefore a huge threat to the sustenance of economic growth in any country.

White-collar crimes are essentially based individually. They are hard to catch but when they are it is often seen that their punishment is far less than what petty criminals get for stealing a mere television set. Often their payoffs are greater than the hard time they have to face with the law enforcement agencies. Furthermore, the exact extent of their victims is hard to diffuse. Essentially white-collar criminals are motivated to carry out various acts of fraud because of greed or their current economical positions.

There is hardly any difference between them and petty street criminals as both are after the same thing sustenance, the only difference perhaps lies in the fact that white-collar criminals are more sophisticated in their means of carrying out crimes and are not easily caught whilst the petty street criminal has to face the consequences. (Keel, 2008)

Professional crime is different from corporate crime in the sense that it is carried out for the benefit of the individual alone and not for the corporation as a whole and almost always the victim is the client alone. So there is a direct link with the client. However, when it comes to corporate crime the victim cannot be easily identified as the victims are society as a whole, the employees, the shareholders, the customers, etc (Keel, 2008)

Corporate crimes are those that are committed by business entities or by individuals who can be identified with the business corporation. They are responsible for huge losses and their victims are infallibly the public at large. When it comes to the impact of these crimes clearly the winner is atrocities committed by big corporations. Such is the case of the pharmaceuticals company and the incident of the poison cyanide that killed several people and impaired several more. Incidentally, people are more hateful towards corporate crimes as opposed to professional crimes. They would rather see severe consequences for big business entities than individuals and rightly so as the losses and damage were done by big companies Enron which is a case in point have long-lasting effects and unnerving results. (Erman, 2005)

Unlike white-collar crime, a corporate crime includes a wide range of misbehavior at the corporate level most of which is serious in nature. It includes giving false statements of assets thus deceiving and manipulating potential investors, occupational safety health hazards, exploitation of labor, misleading advertisements, formation of illegal monopolies, environmental as well as moral degradation, corrupting people, and bribing them all for the purpose of corporate benefits.

Thus we can understand from this that corporate crime has bigger fish to catch and it does not focus solely on individual benefits such as in the case of white-collar crimes but focuses on the attainment of profits that can prove fruitful for the entire company.

Corporate offenses are hard to study as one must have knowledge of not only criminal law but civil and administrative laws as well. Furthermore, a lot more funds are required to study this area of concern as opposed to white-collar crime. Even though corporate crimes have a far-fetched effect on society as compared to conventional professional crimes they are usually not given much media coverage. In fact, the last time such mega coverage was given to acts of corruption by corporations was when the Enron case became highly publicized in the early 2000s. (Clinard and Yeager, 2005)

The most striking difference between the two lies in the resultant impacts. As mentioned before professional crimes have impacts at an individual level but the damage done by corporations is massive. They sell faulty products to millions of their consumers, they collude with one another and keep prices outrageously high thus stealing from consumers, they give false information on their asset holdings and this leads to the defrauding of thousands of investors and pensioners. Similarly, unsafe working conditions put the lives of millions of workers in danger, and have workplace hazards have resulted in the death of millions of workers. (Clinard and Yeager, 2005)

More importantly when it comes to calculating the cost of corporate crimes and those committed by professionals corporate crime far exceeds the amount as compared to the latter. In fact, the cost of corporate crime far exceeds the cost of all kinds of crimes put together such as burglaries, thefts, arsons, and robberies. When corporate crimes do come in court they almost always get away because they have enough resources to fight any case against them whereas a mere white-collar professional is hard to let off the hook.

Furthermore, corporations or corporate officials cannot be stigmatized as criminals and they hardly come in that domain anyway. At a professional level, the story is a little different. Since they are the sole perpetrators of a specific crime they have to bear the stigmatized label of criminal and undertake a heavier penalty. (Clinard and Yeager, 2005)

Corporate crime is more efficient when it comes to undertaking bribery and corruption is more rampant in this case as compared to white-collar crimes. It takes into account window-dressing which although may not be a crime but can still be misleading as it does not take into account the principle of prudence. Furthermore, misinterpretations and deliberate miscalculations in the accountancy department also lead to fraud. (Clinard and Yeager, 2005)

Lastly, the level of power and influence between a corporation and an individual professional is massive. This great difference explains why crimes conducted on behalf of or by corporations are not easily penalized as opposed to those that are carried out by white-collar professionals.

David Erman, 2005, responses to corporate versus individual wrongdoing. Web.

Marshall B Clinard, Peter C. Yeager. Corporate Crime, 2005. Web.

Robert O Keel, White Collar Crime, 2008. Web.

White Collar Crime. Web.

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• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, September 23). Law Enforcement: White-Collar and Corporate Crimes. https://ivypanda.com/essays/law-enforcement-white-collar-and-corporate-crimes/

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White Collar Crime Essay Examples

White collar crime, its types, reasons, and ways to stop.

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White-collar Crime in Education Sector

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