White Collar Crime & criminal careers (original) (raw)

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.