White-Collar Crime and Criminal Careers (original) (raw)

Pre-Sutherland Views on White-Collar Crime

2000

The object of this paper is to discuss the intellectual roots of the white-collar crime concept. This is achieved by exemplifying and discussing selected parts of classic works from the fields of sociology and criminology. The principal focus is on contributions that deal in some substantial way with social phenomena implicit in the concept of white-collar crime. The better known

Sutherland Cleckley and Beyond: White Collar Crime and Psychopathy

Scholarship on white-collar crime by Edwin Sutherland and on psychopathy by Hervey Cleckley influenced criminological and behavioral research on personality traits in the twentieth century and beyond. Over seventy years have passed since their publications, yet white-collar crime scholarship historically and personality traits associated with such offenders to date remains sparse despite the enormity of damage caused by this crime. The authors' analysis contributes to a clearer historical understanding of why empirical white-collar crime scholarship aimed at developing a white-collar offender profile(s) is highly underrepresented in the behavioral and criminological fields relative to non-white-collar crime. The authors found that a plausible partial explanation for the lack of research can be traced to 1) Sutherland's antagonistic view toward the contributions by the behavioral disciplines, 2) minimizing scholarship advocating a multiple factor approach to understanding criminal behavior, and 3) rejection of an inferential statistical methodology applied to criminological research. Secondly, due to Sutherland's legacy on the direction and method of criminological scholarship, the authors find that Sutherland's ambivalence on the role of personality traits and psychopathy in relation to criminal behavior stymied criminological research for over half a century on the development of a white-collar offender profile(s). Moreover, since Cleckley, sparse empirical scholarship by the behavioral sciences has failed to examine the potential implications of psychopathy's role as a white-collar offender behavioral risk factor giving rise to misperceptions about this offender class.

White Collar Crime & criminal careers

Criminologists have turned their attention to the origins and paths of the criminal career for what this approach reveals about the causes, manifestations, and prevention of crime. Studies of the criminal career to date have focused on common criminals and street crime; criminologists have overlooked the careers of white-collar offenders. David Weisburd and Elin Waring offer here the first detailed examination of the criminal careers of people convicted of white-collar crimes. Who are repeat white-collar criminals, and how do their careers differ from those of offenders found in more traditional crime samples? Weisburd and Waring uncover some surprising findings, which upset some long-held common wisdom about white-collar criminals. Most scholars, for example, have assumed that whitecollar criminals, unlike other types of offenders, are unlikely to have multiple or long criminal records. As Weisburd and Waring demonstrate, a significant number of white-collar criminals have multiple contacts with the criminal justice system and like other criminals, they are often led by situational forces such as financial or family crises to commit crimes. White-collar criminals share a number of similarities in their social and economic circumstances with other types of criminals. Weisburd and Waring are led to a portrait of crimes and criminals that is very different from that which has traditionally dominated criminal career studies. It focuses less on the categorical distinctions between criminals and noncriminals and more on the importance of the immediate context of crime and its role in leading otherwise conventional people to violate the law. David Weisburd is Professor of Criminology at The Cambridge Studies in Criminology aims to publish the highest quality research on criminology and criminal justice topics. Typical volumes report major quantitative, qualitative, and ethnographic research, or make a substantial theoretical contribution. There is a particular emphasis on research monographs, but edited collections may also be published if they make an unusually distinctive offering to the literature. All relevant areas of criminology and criminal justice are to be included, for example, the causes of offending, juvenile justice, the development of offenders, measurement and analysis of crime, victimization research, policing, crime prevention, sentencing, imprisonment, probation, and parole. The series is global in outlook, with an emphasis on work that is comparative or holds significant implications for theory or policy.

White Collar Crime Representation in the Criminological Literature Revisited, 2001-2010

This study aims to measure what changes the disciplines of criminology and criminal justice have undergone over the past decade with respect to white collar crime representation in the criminological literature. It is well documented in the white collar crime literature that white collar offending causes a greater number of fatalities, injuries, and illnesses as well as greater economic losses than all street crimes combined. Nevertheless, our analysis of the contents of 15 leading criminology and criminal justice journals from 2001-2010, 13 best-selling introductory CCJ textbooks, and all U.S. Ph.D. granting criminology and criminal justice programs indicates that white collar crime continues to be underrepresented in the criminological literature relative to all street crimes, similar to the findings in Lynch et al.’s 2004 study. Since then, the U.S. has experienced two unprecedented corporate crime waves, in the early part of the 2000s and in the latter part of the decade. Implications for white collar crime representation findings are discussed within the context of harm and crime seriousness relative to street crimes.

White collar crime and the definitional quagmire: A provisional solution

The Journal of Human Justice, 1992

More than virtually any other realm of criminological scholarship, white collar crime study is plagued by unresolved definitional conceptual and typological issues. The present confused and contradictory invocations of the core terminology pertaining to white collar crime introduce a significant element of incoherence into the field. In this paper the seminal origins of the concept of white collar crime, in the work of E. A. Ross and E. H. Sutherland, are explored. The principal elements of subsequent efforts to define white collar crime are identified. It is claimed that a "war of white co Uar criminologists' has emerged, principally pit tin g critical white collar criminologists against positivist white collar criminologists. Some of the strengths and weaknesses of each of the principal constituencies in this definitional war are examined. The paper concludes with the argument that the concept of white collar crime is defined on three different levels-presentational, typological and operational-and that any definition of white collar crime is meaningful only in relation to its stated purpose.

The Criminology of White-Collar Crime

2009

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Life Course Theory and White-Collar Crime

The past two decades have witnessed an explosion of research on developmental and life course theories of crime (for recent reviews, see Loeber and Stouthamer-Loeber 1996;. As is often the case with theoretical developments in criminology, the rise of these new approaches has had little impact on the study of white-collar crime. White-collar crime researchers have not applied life course concepts to their area of study. Likewise, life course criminologists have ignored the implications of white-collar crime for the life course approach.