White Collar Crime
Within the field of criminology, white-collar crime or 'incorporated governance has been defined by Edwin Sutherland as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation (1949). Sutherland was a proponent of Symbolic Interactionism, and believed that criminal behaviour was learned from interpersonal interaction with others. White-collar crime therefore overlaps with corporate crime because the opportunity for fraud, bribery, insider trading, embezzlement, computer crime, and forgery is more available to white-collar employees. Moreover, many corporations also have the resources to challenge many accusations in court and stop the public for scrutinising their activities, in some cases corporations have gone to the extent of using the courts to stop the public (see SLAPPS) from engaging in investigating corporations.
The empirical data clearly demonstrate a double standard between white-collar crimes and so-called street crimes. There are a number of reasons to explain why white-collar criminals are not more rigorously pursued. By virtue of their relative affluence, those accused as white-collar offenders are able to afford the fees of the best lawyers, and may have friends among senior ranks of the political elite, the judiciary and the law enforcement agencies. These connections often not only ensure favourable treatment on an individual basis, but also enable laws to be drafted or resource allocations to be shifted to ensure that such crimes are not defined or enforced too strictly.
It is a fact that virtually no police effort goes into fighting white-collar crime, and the enforcement of many corporate crimes is put into the hands of government agencies like the United States Environmental Protection Agency which can act only as watchdogs and point the finger when an abuse is discovered. This more benign treatment is possible because the true cost of white-collar crime, while high in nationally consolidated accounts, is diffused through the bank balances of millions either by way of share value reductions, or nominal increases in taxation, or increases in the cost of insurance. And because it can be difficult to assign blame, e.g. environmental damage may be serious but corporations cannot be sent to jail and, if those senior officers are removed from their positions, it may be more damaging to the organization itself which employs many ordinary and innocent people, and to the shareholders who had no role to play in taking criminal decision. Different public policies are at work and there are differences in the level of public interest, case complexity, and a lack of white-collar related literature, all of which has a significant effect on the way white-collar offenders are sentenced, punished, and perceived by the public.
Another reason for differential treatment might be the fact that criminal penalties tend to be more related to the degree of physical force or violence involved than to the amount of monetary loss, all other things being equal. Because white-collar crimes are committed by those with opportunities that do not require violence, they are far less likely to garner more severe criminal penalties. For example, someone who robs a victim on the street by threatening to knife them, and steals their wallet, might very likely be punished with a more severe sentence than an inside trader who cheats shareholders out of a million dollars.
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